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THIS CHANGES

EVERYTHING

Capitalism vs. The Climate

NAOMI KLEIN

ALFRED Ai KTOFF CANADA

PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF CANADA
Copyright © 2014 Naomi Klein

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright
Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any
electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval
systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a
reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Published in 2014 by
Alfred A. Knopf Canada, a division of Random House of Canada Limited, a
Penguin Random House Company, and simultaneously in the United States
of America by Simon & Schuster, New York. Distributed in Canada Bay
Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

Knopf Canada and colophon are registered trademarks.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Klein, Naomi, author
This changes everything : capitalism vs. the climate / Naomi Klein.

Includes bibliographical references.

ISBN 978-0-307-40^9^
eBook ISBN 978-0-307-40202-8

r. Climatic changes — Economic aspects. 2. Climatic changes — Political
aspects. 3. Climatic changes — Social aspects. 4. Capitalism. 5. Global

www.penguinrandomhouse.ca

environmental change. I. Title.

QC903.K64 2or4

363.738 74

C2or4-90243r-2

Penguin

Ra nc.lom House

KNOPF CANADA

For Toma

"We need to remember that the work of our time is bigger than
climate change. We need to be setting our sights higher and deeper.
What we're really talking about, if we're honest with ourselves, is
transforming everything about the way we live on this planet."

-Rebecca Tarbotton, Executive Director of the Rainforest Action Network,
1973-2012 1

"In my books I've imagined people salting the Gulf Stream, damming
the glaciers sliding off the Greenland ice cap, pumping ocean water
into the dry basins of the Sahara and Asia to create salt seas, pumping
melted ice from Antarctica north to provide freshwater, genetically
engineering bacteria to sequester more carbon in the roots of trees,
raising Florida 30 feet to get it back above water, and (hardest of all)
comprehensively changing capitalism."

-Science fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson, 2012"

CONTENTS

Cover

Other Books by This Author

Title Page

Dedication

Epigraph

Introduction One Way or Another, Everything Changes

PART ONE
BAD TIMING

01. The Right Is Right: The Revolutionary Power of Climate Change

02. Hot Money: How Free Market Fundamentalism Helped Overheat the Planet

03. Public and Paid For: Overcoming the Ideological Blocks to the Next
Economy

04. Planning and Banning: Slapping the Invisible Hand, Building a Movement

05. Beyond Extractivism: Confronting the Climate Denier Within

PART TWO
MAGICAL THINKING

06. Fruits, Not Roots: The Disastrous Merger of Big Business and Big Green

07. No Messiahs: The Green Billionaires Won't Save Us

08. Dimming the Sun: The Solution to Pollution Is . . . Pollution?

PART THREE
STARTING ANYWAY

09. Blockadia: The New Climate Warriors

10. Love Will Save This Place: Democracy, Divestment, and the Wins So Far

11. You and What Army? Indigenous Rights and the Power of Keeping Our
Word

12. Sharing the Sky: The Atmospheric Commons and the Power of Paying Our
Debts

13. The Right to Regenerate: Moving from Extraction to Renewal

Conclusion The Leap Years: Just Enough Time for Impossible

Notes

Acknowledgments

Introduction

ONE WAY OR ANOTHER, EVERYTHING CHANGES

"Most projections of climate change presume that future changes-
greenhouse gas emissions, temperature increases and effects such as sea
level rise-will happen incrementally. A given amount of emission will
lead to a given amount of temperature increase that will lead to a given
amount of smooth incremental sea level rise. However, the geological
record for the climate reflects instances where a relatively small change
in one element of climate led to abrupt changes in the system as a whole.
In other words, pushing global temperatures past certain thresholds
could trigger abrupt, unpredictable and potentially irreversible changes
that have massively disruptive and large-scale impacts. At that point,
even if we do not add any additional CO2 to the atmosphere, potentially
unstoppable processes are set in motion. We can think of this as sudden
climate brake and steering failure where the problem and its
consequences are no longer something we can control."

— Report by the American Association for the Advancement of Science,

the world's largest general scientific society, 2014

"I love that smell of the emissions."

— Sarah Palin, 201 1 ?

A voice came over the intercom: would the passengers of Flight 3935, scheduled
to depart Washington, D.C., for Charleston, South Carolina, kindly collect their
carry-on luggage and get off the plane.

They went down the stairs and gathered on the hot tarmac. There they saw
something unusual: the wheels of the US Airways jet had sunk into the black

THIS CHANGES EVERYTHING | 1

pavement as if it were wet cement. The wheels were lodged so deep, in fact, that
the truck that came to tow the plane away couldn't pry it loose. The airline had
hoped that without the added weight of the flight's thirty-five passengers, the
aircraft would be light enough to pull. It wasn't. Someone posted a picture: "Why
is my flight cancelled? Because DC is so damn hot that our plane sank 4 into the
pavement.

Eventually, a larger, more powerful vehicle was brought in to tow the plane and
this time it worked; the plane finally took off, three hours behind schedule. A

spokesperson for the airline blamed the incident on "very unusual temperatures."

The temperatures in the summer of 2012 were indeed unusually hot. (As they
were the year before and the year after.) And it's no mystery why this has been
happening: the profligate burning of fossil fuels, the very thing that US Airways
was bound and determined to do despite the inconvenience presented by a melting
tarmac. This irony — the fact that the burning of fossil fuels is so radically changing
our climate that it is getting in the way of our capacity to burn fossil fuels — did not
stop the passengers of Flight 3935 from reembarking and continuing their
journeys. Nor was climate change mentioned in any of the major news coverage
of the incident.

I am in no position to judge these passengers. All of us who live high consumer
lifestyles, wherever we happen to reside, are, metaphorically, passengers on Flight
3935. Faced with a crisis that threatens our survival as a species, our entire culture
is continuing to do the very thing that caused the crisis, only with an extra dose of
elbow grease behind it. Like the airline bringing in a truck with a more powerful
engine to tow that plane, the global economy is upping the ante from conventional
sources of fossil fuels to even dirtier and more dangerous versions — bitumen from
the Alberta tar sands, oil from deepwater drilling, gas from hydraulic fracturing
(fracking), coal from detonated mountains, and so on.

Meanwhile, each supercharged natural disaster produces new irony-laden
snapshots of a climate increasingly inhospitable to the very industries most
responsible for its warming. Like the 2013 historic floods in Calgary that forced
the head offices of the oil companies mining the Alberta tar sands to go dark and
send their employees home, while a train carrying flammable petroleum products
teetered on the edge of a disintegrating rail bridge. Or the drought that hit the
Mississippi River one year earlier, pushing water levels so low that barges loaded
with oil and coal were unable to move for days, while they waited for the Army
Corps of Engineers to dredge a channel (they had to appropriate funds allocated to
rebuild from the previous year's historic flooding along the same waterway). Or

THIS CHANGES EVERYTHING | 2

the coal-fired power plants in other parts of the country that were temporarily shut
down because the waterways that they draw on to cool their machinery were either
too hot or too dry (or, in some cases, both).

Living with this kind of cognitive dissonance is simply part of being alive in this
jarring moment in history, when a crisis we have been studiously ignoring is hitting
us in the face — and yet we are doubling down on the stuff that is causing the crisis
in the first place.

I denied climate change for longer than I care to admit. I knew it was happening,
sure. Not like Donald Trump and the Tea Partiers going on about how the
continued existence of winter proves it's all a hoax. But I stayed pretty hazy on the
details and only skimmed most of the news stories, especially the really scary ones.
I told myself the science was too complicated and that the environmentalists were
dealing with it. And I continued to behave as if there was nothing wrong with the
shiny card in my wallet attesting to my "elite" frequent flyer status.

A great many of us engage in this kind of climate change denial. We look for a
split second and then we look away. Or we look but then turn it into a joke ("more
signs of the Apocalypse!"). Which is another way of looking away.

Or we look but tell ourselves comforting stories about how humans are clever
and will come up with a technological miracle that will safely suck the carbon out
of the skies or magically turn down the heat of the sun. Which, I was to discover
while researching this book, is yet another way of looking away.

Or we look but try to be hyper-rational about it ("dollar for dollar it's more
efficient to focus on economic development than climate change, since wealth is
the best protection from weather extremes") — as if having a few more dollars will
make much difference when your city is underwater. Which is a way of looking
away if you happen to be a policy wonk.

Or we look but tell ourselves we are too busy to care about something so distant
and abstract — even though we saw the water in the subways in New York City,
and the people on their rooftops in New Orleans, and know that no one is safe, the
most vulnerable least of all. And though perfectly understandable, this too is a way
of looking away.

Or we look but tell ourselves that all we can do is focus on ourselves. Meditate
and shop at farmers' markets and stop driving — but forget trying to actually change
the systems that are making the crisis inevitable because that's too much "bad
energy" and it will never work. And at first it may appear as if we are looking,
because many of these lifestyle changes are indeed part of the solution, but we still
have one eye tightly shut.

THIS CHANGES EVERYTHING | 3

Or maybe we do look — really look — but then, inevitably, we seem to forget.
Remember and then forget again. Climate change is like that; it's hard to keep it
in your head for very long. We engage in this odd form of on-again-off-again
ecological amnesia for perfectly rational reasons. We deny because we fear that
letting in the full reality of this crisis will change everything. And we are right."

We know that if we continue on our current path of allowing emissions to rise
year after year, climate change will change everything about our world. Major
cities will very likely drown, ancient cultures will be swallowed by the seas, and
there is a very high chance that our children will spend a great deal of their lives
fleeing and recovering from vicious storms and extreme droughts. And we don't
have to do anything to bring about this future. All we have to do is nothing. Just
continue to do what we are doing now, whether it's counting on a techno-fix or
tending to our gardens or telling ourselves we're unfortunately too busy to deal
with it.

All we have to do is not react as if this is a full-blown crisis. All we have to do
is keep on denying how frightened we actually are. And then, bit by bit, we will
have arrived at the place we most fear, the thing from which we have been averting
our eyes. No additional effort required.

There are ways of preventing this grim future, or at least making it a lot less dire.
But the catch is that these also involve changing everything. For us high
consumers, it involves changing how we live, how our economies function, even
the stories we tell about our place on earth. The good news is that many of these
changes are distinctly un-catastrophic. Many are downright exciting. But I didn't
discover this for a long while.

I remember the precise moment when I stopped averting my eyes to the reality
of climate change, or at least when I first allowed my eyes to rest there for a good
while. It was in Geneva, in April 2009, and I was meeting with Bolivia's
ambassador to the World Trade Organization (WTO), who was then a surprisingly
young woman named Angelica Navarro Llanos. Bolivia being a poor country with
a small international budget, Navarro Llanos had recently taken on the climate
portfolio in addition to her trade responsibilities. Over lunch in an empty Chinese
restaurant, she explained to me (using chopsticks as props to make a graph of the
global emission trajectory) that she saw climate change both as a terrible threat to
her people — but also an opportunity.

A threat for the obvious reasons: Bolivia is extraordinarily dependent on glaciers
for its drinking and irrigation water and those white-capped mountains that tower
over its capital were turning gray and brown at an alarming rate. The opportunity,

THIS CHANGES EVERYTHING | 4

Navarro Llanos said, was that since countries like hers had done almost nothing to
send emissions soaring, they were in a position to declare themselves "climate
creditors," owed money and technology support from the large emitters to defray
the hefty costs of coping with more climate-related disasters, as well as to help
them develop on a green energy path.

She had recently given a speech at a United Nations climate conference in which
she laid out the case for these kinds of wealth transfers, and she gave me a copy.
"Millions of people," it read, "in small islands, least- developed countries,
landlocked countries as well as vulnerable communities in Brazil, India and China,
and all around the world — are suffering from the effects of a problem to which
they did not contribute. ... If we are to curb emissions in the next decade, we need
a massive mobilization larger than any in history. We need a Marshall Plan for the
Earth. This plan must mobilize financing and technology transfer on scales never
seen before. It must get technology onto the ground in every country to ensure we
reduce emissions while raising people's quality of life. We have only a decade."

Of course a Marshall Plan for the Earth would be very costly — hundreds of
billions if not trillions of dollars (Navarro Llanos was reluctant to name a figure).
And one might have thought that the cost alone would make it a nonstarter — after
all, this was 2009 and the global financial crisis was in full swing. Yet the grinding
logic of austerity — passing on the bankers' bills to the people in the form of public
sector layoffs, school closures, and the like — had not yet been normalized. So
rather than making Navarro Llanos' s ideas seem less plausible, the crisis had the
opposite effect.

We had all just watched as trillions of dollars were marshaled in a moment when
our elites decided to declare a crisis. If the banks were allowed to fail, we were
told, the rest of the economy would collapse. It was a matter of collective survival,
so the money had to be found. In the process, some rather large fictions at the heart
of our economic system were exposed (Need more money? Print some!). A few
years earlier, governments took a similar approach to public finances after the
September 11 terrorist attacks. In many Western countries, when it came to
constructing the security/surveillance state at home and waging war abroad,
budgets never seemed to be an issue.

Climate change has never received the crisis treatment from our leaders, despite
the fact that it carries the risk of destroying lives on a vastly greater scale than
collapsed banks or collapsed buildings. The cuts to our greenhouse gas emissions
that scientists tell us are necessary in order to greatly reduce the risk of catastrophe
are treated as nothing more than gentle suggestions, actions that can be put off

THIS CHANGES EVERYTHING | 5

pretty much indefinitely. Clearly, what gets declared a crisis is an expression of
power and priorities as much as hard facts. But we need not be spectators in all
this: politicians aren't the only ones with the power to declare a crisis. Mass
movements of regular people can declare one too.

Slavery wasn't a crisis for British and American elites until abolitionism turned
it into one. Racial discrimination wasn't a crisis until the civil rights movement
turned it into one. Sex discrimination wasn't a crisis until feminism turned it into
one. Apartheid wasn't a crisis until the anti-apartheid movement turned it into one.

In the very same way, if enough of us stop looking away and decide that climate
change is a crisis worthy of Marshall Plan levels of response, then it will become
one, and the political class will have to respond, both by making resources
available and by bending the free market rules that have proven so pliable when
elite interests are in peril. We occasionally catch glimpses of this potential when a
crisis puts climate change at the front of our minds for a while. "Money is no object
in this relief effort. Whatever money is needed for it will be spent," declared British
prime minister David Cameron — Mr. Austerity himself — when large parts of his
country were underwater from historic flooding in February 2014 and the public

was enraged that his government was not doing more to help.

Listening to Navarro Llanos describe Bolivia's perspective, I began to
understand how climate change — if treated as a true planetary emergency akin to
those rising flood waters — could become a galvanizing force for humanity, leaving
us all not just safer from extreme weather, but with societies that are safer and
fairer in all kinds of other ways as well. The resources required to rapidly move
away from fossil fuels and prepare for the coming heavy weather could pull huge
swaths of humanity out of poverty, providing services now sorely lacking, from
clean water to electricity. This is a vision of the future that goes beyond just
surviving or enduring climate change, beyond "mitigating" and "adapting" to it in
the grim language of the United Nations. It is a vision in which we collectively use
the crisis to leap somewhere that seems, frankly, better than where we are right
now.

After that conversation, I found that I no longer feared immersing myself in the
scientific reality of the climate threat. I stopped avoiding the articles and the
scientific studies and read everything I could find. I also stopped outsourcing the
problem to the environmentalists, stopped telling myself this was somebody else's
issue, somebody else's job. And through conversations with others in the growing
climate justice movement, I began to see all kinds of ways that climate change
could become a catalyzing force for positive change — how it could be the best

THIS CHANGES EVERYTHING | 6

argument progressives have ever had to demand the rebuilding and reviving of
local economies; to reclaim our democracies from corrosive corporate influence;
to block harmful new free trade deals and rewrite old ones; to invest in starving
public infrastructure like mass transit and affordable housing; to take back
ownership of essential services like energy and water; to remake our sick
agricultural system into something much healthier; to open borders to migrants
whose displacement is linked to climate impacts; to finally respect Indigenous land
rights — all of which would help to end grotesque levels of inequality within our
nations and between them.

And I started to see signs — new coalitions and fresh arguments — hinting at how,
if these various connections were more widely understood, the urgency of the
climate crisis could form the basis of a powerful mass movement, one that would
weave all these seemingly disparate issues into a coherent narrative about how to
protect humanity from the ravages of both a savagely unjust economic system and
a destabilized climate system. I have written this book because I came to the
conclusion that climate action could provide just such a rare catalyst.

A People's Shock

But I also wrote it because climate change can be a catalyst for a range of very
different and far less desirable forms of social, political, and economic
transformation.

I have spent the last fifteen years immersed in research about societies
undergoing extreme shocks — caused by economic meltdowns, natural disasters,
terrorist attacks, and wars. And I have looked deeply into how societies change in
these periods of tremendous stress. How these events change the collective sense
of what is possible, for better but mostly for worse. As I discussed in my last
book, The Shock Doctrine, over the past four decades corporate interests have
systematically exploited these various forms of crisis to ram through policies that
enrich a small elite — by lifting regulations, cutting social spending, and forcing
large-scale privatizations of the public sphere. They have also been the excuse for
extreme crackdowns on civil liberties and chilling human rights violations.

And there are plenty of signs that climate change will be no exception — that,
rather than sparking solutions that have a real chance of preventing catastrophic
warming and protecting us from inevitable disasters, the crisis will once again be
seized upon to hand over yet more resources to the 1 percent. You can see the early

THIS CHANGES EVERYTHING | 7

stages of this process already. Communal forests around the world are being turned
into privatized tree farms and preserves so their owners can collect something
called "carbon credits," a lucrative scam I'll explore later. There is a booming trade
in "weather futures," allowing companies and banks to gamble on changes in the
weather as if deadly disasters were a game on a Vegas craps table (between 2005
and 2006 the weather derivatives market jumped nearly fivefold, from $9.7
billion to $45.2 billion). Global reinsurance companies are making billions in
profits, in part by selling new kinds of protection schemes to developing countries
that have done almost nothing to create the climate crisis, but whose infrastructure
is intensely vulnerable to its impacts."

And in a moment of candor, the weapons giant Raytheon explained, "Expanded
business opportunities are likely to arise as consumer behaviour and needs change
in response to climate change." Those opportunities include not just more demand
for the company's privatized disaster response services but also "demand for its
military products and services as security concerns may arise as results of

droughts, floods, and storm events occur as a result of climate change." This is
worth remembering whenever doubts creep in about the urgency of this crisis: the
private militias are already mobilizing.

Droughts and floods create all kinds of business opportunities besides a growing
demand for men with guns. Between 2008 and 2010, at least 261 patents were filed
related to growing "climate-ready" crops — seeds supposedly able to withstand
extreme weather conditions; of these patents close to 80 percent were controlled
by six agribusiness giants, including Monsanto and Syngenta. Superstorm Sandy,
meanwhile, has been a windfall for New Jersey real estate developers who have
received millions for new construction in lightly damaged areas, while it continues
to be a nightmare for those living in hard-hit public housing, much as the aftermath
of Hurricane Katrina played out in New Orleans.

None of this is surprising. Finding new ways to privatize the commons and profit
from disaster is what our current system is built to do; left to its own devices, it is
capable of nothing else. The shock doctrine, however, is not the only way societies
respond to crises. We have all witnessed this in recent years as the financial
meltdown that began on Wall Street in 2008 reverberated around the world. A
sudden rise in food prices helped create the conditions for the Arab Spring.
Austerity policies have inspired mass movements from Greece to Spain to Chile
to the United States to Quebec. Many of us are getting a lot better at standing up
to those who would cynically exploit crises to ransack the public sphere. And yet
these protests have also shown that saying no is not enough. If opposition

THIS CHANGES EVERYTHING | 8

movements are to do more than burn bright and then burn out, they will need a
comprehensive vision for what should emerge in the place of our failing system,
as well as serious political strategies for how to achieve those goals.

Progressives used to know how to do this. There is a rich populist history of
winning big victories for social and economic justice in the midst of large-scale
crises. These include, most notably, the policies of the New Deal after the market
crash of 1929 and the birth of countless social programs after World War II. These
policies were so popular with voters that getting them passed into law did not
require the kind of authoritarian trickery that I documented in The Shock
Doctrine. What was essential was building muscular mass movements capable of
standing up to those defending a failing status quo, and that demanded a
significantly fairer share of the economic pie for everyone. A few of the lasting
(though embattled) legacies of these exceptional historical moments include:
public health insurance in many countries, old age pensions, subsidized housing,
and public funding for the arts.

I am convinced that climate change represents a historic opportunity on an even
greater scale. As part of the project of getting our emissions down to the levels
many scientists recommend, we once again have the chance to advance policies
that dramatically improve lives, close the gap between rich and poor, create huge
numbers of good jobs, and reinvigorate democracy from the ground up. Rather
than the ultimate expression of the shock doctrine — a frenzy of new resource grabs
and repression — climate change can be a People's Shock, a blow from below. It
can disperse power into the hands of the many rather than consolidating it in the
hands of the few, and radically expand the commons, rather than auctioning it off
in pieces. And where right-wing shock doctors exploit emergencies (both real and
manufactured) in order to push through policies that make us even more crisis
prone, the kinds of transformations discussed in these pages would do the exact
opposite: they would get to the root of why we are facing serial crises in the first
place, and would leave us with both a more habitable climate than the one we are
headed for and a far more just economy than the one we have right now.

But before any of these changes can happen — before we can believe that climate
change can change us — we first have to stop looking away.

"You have been negotiating all my life." So said Canadian college student Anjali
Appadurai, as she stared down the assembled government negotiators at the 2011
United Nations climate conference in Durban, South Africa. She was not

THIS CHANGES EVERYTHING | 9

exaggerating. The world's governments have been talking about preventing
climate change for more than two decades; they began negotiating the year that
Anjali, then twenty-one years old, was born. And yet as she pointed out in her
memorable speech on the convention floor, delivered on behalf of all of the
assembled young people: "In that time, you've failed to meet pledges, you've
missed targets, and you've broken promises. "~

In truth, the intergovernmental body entrusted to prevent "dangerous" levels of
climate change has not only failed to make progress over its twenty-odd years of
work (and more than ninety official negotiation meetings since the agreement was
adopted), it has overseen a process of virtually uninterrupted backsliding. Our
governments wasted years fudging numbers and squabbling over start dates,
perpetually trying to get extensions like undergrads with late term papers.

The catastrophic result of all this obfuscation and procrastination is now
undeniable. Preliminary data shows that in 2013, global carbon dioxide emissions
were 61 percent higher than they were in 1990, when negotiations toward a climate
treaty began in earnest. As MIT economist John Reilly puts it: "The more we talk
about the need to control emissions, the more they are growing." Indeed the only
thing rising faster than our emissions is the output of words pledging to lower them.
Meanwhile, the annual U.N. climate summit, which remains the best hope for a
political breakthrough on climate action, has started to seem less like a forum for
serious negotiation than a very costly and high-carbon group therapy session, a
place for the representatives of the most vulnerable countries in the world to vent
their grief and rage while low-level representatives of the nations largely

responsible for their tragedies stare at their shoes.

This has been the mood ever since the collapse of the much-hyped 2009 U.N.
climate summit in Copenhagen. On the last night of that massive gathering, I found
myself with a group of climate justice activists, including one of the most
prominent campaigners in Britain. Throughout the summit, this young man had
been the picture of confidence and composure, briefing dozens of journalists a day
on what had gone on during eachround of negotiations and what the various
emission targets meant in the real world. Despite the challenges, his optimism
about the summit's prospects never flagged. Once it was all over, however, and
the pitiful deal was done, he fell apart before our eyes. Sitting in an overlit Italian
restaurant, he began to sob uncontrollably. "I really thought Obama understood,"
he kept repeating.

I have come to think of that night as the climate movement's coming of age: it
was the moment when the realization truly sank in that no one was coming to save

THIS CHANGES EVERYTHING | 10

us. The British psychoanalyst and climate specialist Sally Weintrobe describes this
as the summit's "fundamental legacy" — the acute and painful realization that our
"leaders are not looking after us ... we are not cared for at the level of our very

survival."^ No matter how many times we have been disappointed by the failings
of our politicians, this realization still comes as a blow. It really is the case that we
are on our own and any credible source of hope in this crisis will have to come
from below.

In Copenhagen, the major polluting governments — including the United States
and China — signed a nonbinding agreement pledging to keep temperatures from
increasing more than 2 degrees Celsius above where they were before we started
powering our economies with coal. (That converts to an increase of 3.6 degrees
Fahrenheit.) This well-known target, which supposedly represents the "safe" limit
of climate change, has always been a highly political choice that has more to do
with minimizing economic disruption than with protecting the greatest number of
people. When the 2 degrees target was made official in Copenhagen, there were
impassioned objections from many delegates who said the goal amounted to a
"death sentence" for some low-lying island states, as well as for large parts of Sub-
Saharan Africa. In fact it is a very risky target for all of us: so far, temperatures
have increased by just .8 degree Celsius and we are already experiencing many
alarming impacts, including the unprecedented melting of the Greenland ice sheet
in the summer of 2012 and the acidification of oceans far more rapidly than
expected. Allowing temperatures to warm by more than twice that amount will
unquestionably have perilous consequences.

In a 2012 report, the World Bank laid out the gamble implied by that target. "As
global warming approaches and exceeds 2-degrees Celsius, there is a risk of
triggering nonlinear tipping elements. Examples include the disintegration of the
West Antarctic ice sheet leading to more rapid sea-level rise, or large-scale
Amazon dieback drastically affecting ecosystems, rivers, agriculture, energy
production, and livelihoods. This would further add to 21st-century global
warming and impact entire continents."^ In other words, once we allow
temperatures to climb past a certain point, where the mercury stops is not in our
control.

But the bigger problem — and the reason Copenhagen caused such great
despair — is that because governments did not agree to binding targets, they are
free to pretty much ignore their commitments. Which is precisely what is
happening. Indeed, emissions are rising so rapidly that unless something radical
changes within our economic structure, 2 degrees now looks like a Utopian dream.

THIS CHANGES EVERYTHING | 11

And it's not just environmentalists who are raising the alarm. The World Bank also
warned when it released its report that "we're on track for a 4°C warmer world [by
century's end] marked by extreme heat waves, declining global food stocks, loss
of ecosystems and biodiversity, and life-threatening sea level rise." And the report
cautioned that, "there is also no certainty that adaptation to a 4°C world is
possible." Kevin Anderson, former director (now deputy director) of the Tyndall
Centre for Climate Change Research, which has quickly established itself as one
of the U.K.'s premier climate research institutions, is even blunter; he says 4
degrees Celsius warming — 7.2 degrees Fahrenheit — is "incompatible with any
reasonable characterization of an organized, equitable and civilized global

,,16

community.

We don't know exactly what a 4 degrees Celsius world would look like, but even
the best-case scenario is likely to be calamitous. Four degrees of warming could
raise global sea levels by 1 or possibly even 2 meters by 2100 (and would lock in
at least a few additional meters over future centuries). This would drown some
island nations such as the Maldives and Tuvalu, and inundate many coastal areas
from Ecuador and Brazil to the Netherlands to much of California and the
northeastern United States, as well as huge swaths of South and Southeast Asia.
Major cities likely in jeopardy include Boston, New York, greater Los Angeles,

Vancouver, London, Mumbai, Hong Kong, and Shanghai.

Meanwhile, brutal heat waves that can kill tens of thousands of people, even in
wealthy countries, would become entirely unremarkable summer events on every
continent but Antarctica. The heat would also cause staple crops to suffer dramatic
yield losses across the globe (it is possible that Indian wheat and U.S. corn could
plummet by as much as 60 percent), this at a time when demand will be surging
due to population growth and a growing demand for meat. And since crops will be
facing not just heat stress but also extreme events such as wide-ranging droughts,
flooding, or pest outbreaks, the losses could easily turn out to be more severe than
the models have predicted. When you add ruinous hurricanes, raging wildfires,
fisheries collapses, widespread disruptions to water supplies, extinctions, and
globetrotting diseases to the mix, it indeed becomes difficult to imagine that a
peaceful, ordered society could be sustained (that is, where such a thing exists in
the first place). ~

And keep in mind that these are the optimistic scenarios in which warming is
more or less stabilized at 4 degrees Celsius and does not trigger tipping points
beyond which runaway warming would occur. Based on the latest modeling, it is
becoming safer to assume that 4 degrees could bring about a number of extremely

THIS CHANGES EVERYTHING | 12

dangerous feedback loops — an Arctic that is regularly ice-free in September, for
instance, or, according to one recent study, global vegetation that is too saturated
to act as a reliable "sink," leading to more carbon being emitted rather than stored.
Once this happens, any hope of predicting impacts pretty much goes out the
window. And this process may be starting sooner than anyone predicted. In May
2014, NASA and University of California, Irvine scientists revealed that glacier
melt in a section of West Antarctica roughly the size of France now "appears
unstoppable." This likely spells doom for the entire West Antarctic ice sheet,
which according to lead study author Eric Rignot "comes with a sea level rise of
between three and five metres. Such an event will displace millions of people
worldwide." The disintegration, however, could unfold over centuries and there is

still time for emission reductions to slow down the process and prevent the worst.

Much more frightening than any of this is the fact that plenty of mainstream
analysts think that on our current emissions trajectory, we are headed for even
more than 4 degrees of warming. In 2011, the usually staid International Energy
Agency (IEA) issued a report projecting that we are actually on track for 6 degrees
Celsius — 10.8 degrees Fahrenheit — of warming. And as the IEA' s chief economist
put it: "Everybody, even the school children, knows that this will have catastrophic
implications for all of us." (The evidence indicates that 6 degrees of warming is
likely to set in motion several major tipping points — not only slower ones such as
the aforementioned breakdown of the West Antarctic ice sheet, but possibly more
abrupt ones, like massive releases of methane from Arctic permafrost.) The
accounting giant PricewaterhouseCoopers has also published a report warning

businesses that we are headed for "4°C, or even 6°C" of warming.^

These various projections are the equivalent of every alarm in your house going
off simultaneously. And then every alarm on your street going off as well, one by
one by one. They mean, quite simply, that climate change has become an
existential crisis for the human species. The only historical precedent for a crisis
of this depth and scale was the Cold War fear that we were heading toward nuclear
holocaust, which would have made much of the planet uninhabitable. But that was
(and remains) a threat; a slim possibility, should geopolitics spiral out of control.
The vast majority of nuclear scientists never told us that we were almost certainly
going to put our civilization in peril if we kept going about our daily lives as usual,
doing exactly what we were already doing, which is what the climate scientists
have been telling us for years.

As the Ohio State University climatologist Lonnie G. Thompson, a world-
renowned specialist on glacier melt, explained in 2010, "Climatologists, like other

THIS CHANGES EVERYTHING | 13

scientists, tend to be a stolid group. We are not given to theatrical rantings about
falling skies. Most of us are far more comfortable in our laboratories or gathering
data in the field than we are giving interviews to journalists or speaking before
Congressional committees. Why then are climatologists speaking out about the
dangers of global warming? The answer is that virtually all of us are now

convinced that global warming poses a clear and present danger to civilization."

It doesn't get much clearer than that. And yet rather than responding with alarm
and doing everything in our power to change course, large parts of humanity are,
quite consciously, continuing down the same road. Only, like the passengers
aboard Flight 3935, aided by a more powerful, dirtier engine.

What is wrong with us?

Really Bad Timing

Many answers to that question have been offered, ranging from the extreme
difficulty of getting all the governments in the world to agree on anything, to an
absence of real technological solutions, to something deep in our human nature
that keeps us from acting in the face of seemingly remote threats, to — more
recently — the claim that we have blown it anyway and there is no point in even
trying to do much more than enjoy the scenery on the way down.

Some of these explanations are valid, but all are ultimately inadequate. Take the
claim that it's just too hard for so many countries to agree on a course of action. It
is hard. But many times in the past, the United Nations has helped governments to
come together to tackle tough cross-border challenges, from ozone depletion to
nuclear proliferation. The deals produced weren't perfect, but they represented real
progress. Moreover, during the same years that our governments failed to enact a
tough and binding legal architecture requiring emission reductions, supposedly
because cooperation was too complex, they managed to create the World Trade
Organization — an intricate global system that regulates the flow of goods and
services around the planet, under which the rules are clear and violations are
harshly penalized.

The assertion that we have been held back by a lack of technological solutions
is no more compelling. Power from renewable sources like wind and water
predates the use of fossil fuels and is becoming cheaper, more efficient, and easier
to store every year. The past two decades have seen an explosion of ingenious zero-
waste design, as well as green urban planning. Not only do we have the technical

THIS CHANGES EVERYTHING | 14

tools to get off fossil fuels, we also have no end of small pockets where these low
carbon lifestyles have been tested with tremendous success. And yet the kind of
large-scale transition that would give us a collective chance of averting catastrophe
eludes us.

Is it just human nature that holds us back then? In fact we humans have shown
ourselves willing to collectively sacrifice in the face of threats many times, most
famously in the embrace of rationing, victory gardens, and victory bonds during
World Wars I and II. Indeed to support fuel conservation during World War II,
pleasure driving was virtually eliminated in the U.K., and between 1938 and 1944,
use of public transit went up by 87 percent in the U.S. and by 95 percent in Canada.
Twenty million U.S. households — representing three fifths of the population —
were growing victory gardens in 1943, and their yields accounted for 42 percent
of the fresh vegetables consumed that year. Interestingly, all of these activities

together dramatically reduce carbon emissions.

Yes, the threat of war seemed immediate and concrete but so too is the threat
posed by the climate crisis that has already likely been a substantial contributor to
massive disasters in some of the world's major cities. Still, we've gone soft since
those days of wartime sacrifice, haven't we? Contemporary humans are too self-
centered, too addicted to gratification to live without the full freedom to satisfy our
every whim — or so our culture tells us every day. And yet the truth is that we
continue to make collective sacrifices in the name of an abstract greater good all
the time. We sacrifice our pensions, our hard-won labor rights, our arts and after-
school programs. We send our kids to learn in ever more crowded classrooms, led
by ever more harried teachers. We accept that we have to pay dramatically more
for the destructive energy sources that power our transportation and our lives. We
accept that bus and subway fares go up and up while service fails to improve or
degenerates. We accept that a public university education should result in a debt
that will take half a lifetime to pay off when such a thing was unheard of a
generation ago. In Canada, where I live, we are in the midst of accepting that our
mail can no longer be delivered to our homes.

The past thirty years have been a steady process of getting less and less in the
public sphere. This is all defended in the name of austerity, the current justification
for these never-ending demands for collective sacrifice. In the past, other words
and phrases, equally abstracted from daily life, have served a similar purpose:
balanced budgets, increased efficiency, fostering economic growth.

It seems to me that if humans are capable of sacrificing this much collective
benefit in the name of stabilizing an economic system that makes daily life so much

THIS CHANGES EVERYTHING | 15

more expensive and precarious, then surely humans should be capable of making
some important lifestyle changes in the interest of stabilizing the physical systems
upon which all of life depends. Especially because many of the changes that need
to be made to dramatically cut emissions would also materially improve the quality
of life for the majority of people on the planet — from allowing kids in Beijing to
play outside without wearing pollution masks to creating good jobs in clean energy
sectors for millions. There seems to be no shortage of both short-term and medium-
term incentives to do the right thing for our climate.

Time is tight, to be sure. But we could commit ourselves, tomorrow, to radically
cutting our fossil fuel emissions and beginning the shift to zero-carbon sources of
energy based on renewable technology, with a full-blown transition underway
within the decade. We have the tools to do that. And if we did, the seas would still
rise and the storms would still come, but we would stand a much greater chance of
preventing truly catastrophic warming. Indeed, entire nations could be saved from
the waves. As Pablo Solon, Bolivia's former ambassador to the United Nations,
puts it: "If I burned your house the least I can do is welcome you into my

house . . . and if I'm burning it right now I should try to stop the fire now."^

But we are not stopping the fire. In fact we are dousing it with gasoline. After a
rare decline in 2009 due to the financial crisis, global emissions surged by a
whopping 5.9 percent in 2010 — the largest absolute increase since the Industrial

Revolution.^

So my mind keeps coming back to the question: what is wrong with us? What is
really preventing us from putting out the fire that is threatening to burn down our
collective house?

I think the answer is far more simple than many have led us to believe: we have
not done the things that are necessary to lower emissions because those things
fundamentally conflict with deregulated capitalism, the reigning ideology for the
entire period we have been struggling to find a way out of this crisis. We are stuck
because the actions that would give us the best chance of averting catastrophe —
and would benefit the vast majority — are extremely threatening to an elite minority
that has a stranglehold over our economy, our political process, and most of our
major media outlets. That problem might not have been insurmountable had it
presented itself at another point in our history. But it is our great collective
misfortune that the scientific community made its decisive diagnosis of the climate
threat at the precise moment when those elites were enjoying more unfettered
political, cultural, and intellectual power than at any point since the 1920s. Indeed,
governments and scientists began talking seriously about radical cuts to

THIS CHANGES EVERYTHING | 16

greenhouse gas emissions in 1988 — the exact year that marked the dawning of
what came to be called "globalization," with the signing of the
agreement representing the world's largest bilateral trade relationship between
Canada and the United States, later to be expanded into the North American Free

Trade Agreement (NAFTA) with the inclusion of Mexico.

When historians look back on the past quarter century of international
negotiations, two defining processes will stand out. There will be the climate
process: struggling, sputtering, failing utterly to achieve its goals. And there will
be the corporate globalization process, zooming from victory to victory: from that
first free trade deal to the creation of the World Trade Organization to the mass
privatization of the former Soviet economies to the transformation of large parts
of Asia into sprawling free-trade zones to the "structural adjusting" of Africa.
There were setbacks to that process, to be sure — for example, popular pushback
that stalled trade rounds and free trade deals. But what remained successful were
the ideological underpinnings of the entire project, which was never really about
trading goods across borders — selling French wine in Brazil, for instance, or U.S.
software in China. It was always about using these sweeping deals, as well as a
range of other tools, to lock in a global policy framework that provided maximum
freedom to multinational corporations to produce their goods as cheaply as
possible and sell them with as few regulations as possible — while paying as little
in taxes as possible. Granting this corporate wishlist, we were told, would fuel
economic growth, which would trickle down to the rest of us, eventually. The trade
deals mattered only in so far as they stood in for, and plainly articulated, this far
broader agenda.

The three policy pillars of this new era are familiar to us all: privatization of the
public sphere, deregulation of the corporate sector, and lower corporate taxation,
paid for with cuts to public spending. Much has been written about the real-world
costs of these policies — the instability of financial markets, the excesses of the
super-rich, and the desperation of the increasingly disposable poor, as well as the
failing state of public infrastructure and services. Very little, however, has been
written about how market fundamentalism has, from the very first moments,
systematically sabotaged our collective response to climate change, a threat that
came knocking just as this ideology was reaching its zenith.

The core problem was that the stranglehold that market logic secured over public
life in this period made the most direct and obvious climate responses seem
politically heretical. How, for instance, could societies invest massively in zero-
carbon public services and infrastructure at a time when the public sphere was

THIS CHANGES EVERYTHING | 17

being systematically dismantled and auctioned off? How could governments
heavily regulate, tax, and penalize fossil fuel companies when all such measures
were being dismissed as relics of "command and control" communism? And how
could the renewable energy sector receive the supports and protections it needed
to replace fossil fuels when "protectionism" had been made a dirty word?

A different kind of climate movement would have tried to challenge the extreme
ideology that was blocking so much sensible action, joining with other sectors to
show how unfettered corporate power posed a grave threat to the habitability of
the planet. Instead, large parts of the climate movement wasted precious decades
attempting to make the square peg of the climate crisis fit into the round hole of
deregulated capitalism, forever touting ways for the problem to be solved by the
market itself. (Though it was only years into this project that I discovered the
depths of collusion between big polluters and Big Green.)

But blocking strong climate action wasn't the only way that the triumph of
market fundamentalism acted to deepen the crisis in this period. Even more
directly, the policies that so successfully freed multinational corporations from
virtually all constraints also contributed significantly to the underlying cause of
global warming — rising greenhouse gas emissions. The numbers are striking: in
the 1990s, as the market integration project ramped up, global emissions were
going up an average of 1 percent a year; by the 2000s, with "emerging markets"
like China now fully integrated into the world economy, emissions growth had
sped up disastrously, with the annual rate of increase reaching 3.4 percent a year
for much of the decade. That rapid growth rate continues to this day, interrupted

only briefly in 2009 by the world financial crisis.

With hindsight, it's hard to see how it could have turned out otherwise. The twin
signatures of this era have been the mass export of products across vast distances
(relentlessly burning carbon all the way), and the import of a uniquely wasteful
model of production, consumption, and agriculture to every corner of the world
(also based on the profligate burning of fossil fuels). Put differently, the liberation
of world markets, a process powered by the liberation of unprecedented amounts
of fossil fuels from the earth, has dramatically sped up the same process that is
liberating Arctic ice from existence.

As a result, we now find ourselves in a very difficult and slighty ironic position.
Because of those decades of hardcore emitting exactly when we were supposed to
be cutting back, the things we must do to avoid catastrophic warming are no longer
just in conflict with the particular strain of deregulated capitalism that triumphed

THIS CHANGES EVERYTHING | 18

in the 1980s. They are now in conflict with the fundamental imperative at the heart
of our economic model: grow or die.

Once carbon has been emitted into the atmosphere, it sticks around for hundreds
of years, some of it even longer, trapping heat. The effects are cumulative, growing
more severe with time. And according to emissions specialists like the Tyndall
Centre's Kevin Anderson (as well as others), so much carbon has been allowed to
accumulate in the atmosphere over the past two decades that now our only hope of
keeping warming below the internationally agreed-upon target of 2 degrees Celsius
is for wealthy countries to cut their emissions by somewhere in the neighborhood

of 8-10 percent a year.^ The "free" market simply cannot accomplish this task.
Indeed, this level of emission reduction has happened only in the context of
economic collapse or deep depressions.

I'll be delving deeper into those numbers in Chapter 2 , but the bottom line is
what matters here: our economic system and our planetary system are now at war.
Or, more accurately, our economy is at war with many forms of life on earth,
including human life. What the climate needs to avoid collapse is a contraction in
humanity's use of resources; what our economic model demands to avoid collapse
is unfettered expansion. Only one of these sets of rules can be changed, and it' s
not the laws of nature.

Fortunately, it is eminently possible to transform our economy so that it is less
resource-intensive, and to do it in ways that are equitable, with the most vulnerable
protected and the most responsible bearing the bulk of the burden. Low-carbon
sectors of our economies can be encouraged to expand and create jobs, while high-
carbon sectors are encouraged to contract. The problem, however, is that this scale
of economic planning and management is entirely outside the boundaries of our
reigning ideology. The only kind of contraction our current system can manage is
a brutal crash, in which the most vulnerable will suffer most of all.

So we are left with a stark choice: allow climate disruption to change everything
about our world, or change pretty much everything about our economy to avoid
that fate. But we need to be very clear: because of our decades of collective denial,
no gradual, incremental options are now available to us. Gentle tweaks to the status
quo stopped being a climate option when we super sized the American Dream in
the 1990s, and then proceeded to take it global. And it's no longer just radicals
who see the need for radical change. In 2012, twenty-one past winners of the
prestigious Blue Planet Prize — a group that includes James Hansen, former
director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, and Gro Harlem
Brundtland, former prime minister of Norway — authored a landmark report. It

THIS CHANGES EVERYTHING | 19

stated that, "In the face of an absolutely unprecedented emergency, society has no
choice but to take dramatic action to avert a collapse of civilization. Either we will
change our ways and build an entirely new kind of global society, or they will be

changed for us."

That's tough for a lot of people in important positions to accept, since it
challenges something that might be even more powerful than capitalism, and that
is the fetish of centrism — of reasonableness, seriousness, splitting the difference,
and generally not getting overly excited about anything. This is the habit of thought
that truly rules our era, far more among the liberals who concern themselves with
matters of climate policy than among conservatives, many of whom simply deny
the existence of the crisis. Climate change presents a profound challenge to this
cautious centrism because half measures won't cut it: "all of the above energy"
programs, as U.S. President Barack Obama describes his approach, has about as
much chance of success as an all of the above diet, and the firm deadlines imposed
by science require that we get very worked up indeed.

By posing climate change as a battle between capitalism and the planet, I am not
saying anything that we don't already know. The battle is already under way, but
right now capitalism is winning hands down. It wins every time the need for
economic growth is used as the excuse for putting off climate action yet again, or
for breaking emission reduction commitments already made. It wins when Greeks
are told that their only path out of economic crisis is to open up their beautiful seas
to high-risk oil and gas drilling. It wins when Canadians are told our only hope of
not ending up like Greece is to allow our boreal forests to be flayed so we can
access the semisolid bitumen from the Alberta tar sands. It wins when a park in
Istanbul is slotted for demolition to make way for yet another shopping mall. It
wins when parents in Beijing are told that sending their wheezing kids to school in
pollution masks decorated to look like cute cartoon characters is an acceptable
price for economic progress. It wins every time we accept that we have only bad
choices available to us: austerity or extraction, poisoning or poverty.

The challenge, then, is not simply that we need to spend a lot of money and
change a lot of policies; it's that we need to think differently, radically differently,
for those changes to be remotely possible. Right now, the triumph of market logic,
with its ethos of domination and fierce competition, is paralyzing almost all serious
efforts to respond to climate change. Cutthroat competition between nations has
deadlocked U.N. climate negotiations for decades: rich countries dig in their heels
and declare that they won't cut emissions and risk losing their vaulted position in
the global hierarchy; poorer countries declare that they won't give up their right to

THIS CHANGES EVERYTHING | 20

pollute as much as rich countries did on their way to wealth, even if that means
deepening a disaster that hurts the poor most of all. For any of this to change, a
worldview will need to rise to the fore that sees nature, other nations, and our own
neighbors not as adversaries, but rather as partners in a grand project of mutual
reinvention.

That's a big ask. But it gets bigger. Because of our endless delays, we also have
to pull off this massive transformation without delay. The International Energy
Agency warns that if we do not get our emissions under control by a rather
terrifying 2017, our fossil fuel economy will "lock-in" extremely dangerous
warming. "The energy-related infrastructure then in place will generate all the
CO2 emissions allowed" in our carbon budget for limiting warming to 2 degrees
Celsius — "leaving no room for additional power plants, factories and other
infrastructure unless they are zero-carbon, which would be extremely costly." This
assumes, probably accurately, that governments would be unwilling to force the
closure of still-profitable power plants and factories. As Fatih Birol, the IEA's
chief economist, bluntly put it: "The door to reach two degrees is about to close.
In 2017 it will be closed forever." In short, we have reached what some activists
have started calling "Decade Zero" of the climate crisis: we either change now or

we lose our chance.

All this means that the usual free market assurances — A techno-fix is around the
corner! Dirty development is just a phase on the way to a clean environment, look
at nineteenth-century London! — simply don't add up. We don't have a century to
spare for China and India to move past their Dickensian phases. Because of our
lost decades, it is time to turn this around now. Is it possible? Absolutely. Is it
possible without challenging the fundamental logic of deregulated capitalism? Not
a chance.

One of the people I met on this journey and who you will meet in these pages is
Henry Red Cloud, a Lakota educator and entrepreneur who trains young Native
people to become solar engineers. He tells his students that there are times when
we must accept small steps forward — and there are other times "when you need to

run like a buffalo." Now is one of those times when we must run.

THIS CHANGES EVERYTHING | 21

Power, Not Just Energy

I was struck recently by a mea culpa of sorts, written by Gary Stix, a senior editor
of Scientific American. Back in 2006, he edited a special issue on responses to
climate change and, like most such efforts, the articles were narrowly focused on
showcasing exciting low-carbon technologies. But in 2012 Stix wrote that he had
overlooked a much larger and more important part of the story — the need to create
the social and political context in which these technological shifts stand a chance
of displacing the all too profitable status quo. "If we are ever to cope with climate
change in any fundamental way, radical solutions on the social side are where we
must focus, though. The relative efficiency of the next generation of solar cells is

trivial by comparison."

This book is about those radical changes on the social side, as well as on the
political, economic, and cultural sides. What concerns me is less the mechanics of
the transition — the shift from brown to green energy, from sole -rider cars to mass
transit, from sprawling exurbs to dense and walk-able cities — than the power and
ideological roadblocks that have so far prevented any of these long understood
solutions from taking hold on anything close to the scale required.

It seems to me that our problem has a lot less to do with the mechanics of solar
power than the politics of human power — specifically whether there can be a shift
in who wields it, a shift away from corporations and toward communities, which
in turn depends on whether or not the great many people who are getting a rotten
deal under our current system can build a determined and diverse enough social
force to change the balance of power. I have also come to understand, over the
course of researching this book, that the shift will require rethinking the very nature
of humanity's power — our right to extract ever more without facing consequences,
our capacity to bend complex natural systems to our will. This is a shift that
challenges not only capitalism, but also the building blocks of materialism that
preceded modern capitalism, a mentality some call "extractivism."

Because, underneath all of this is the real truth we have been avoiding: climate
change isn't an "issue" to add to the list of things to worry about, next to health
care and taxes. It is a civilizational wake-up call. A powerful message — spoken in
the language of fires, floods, droughts, and extinctions — telling us that we need an
entirely new economic model and a new way of sharing this planet. Telling us that
we need to evolve.

THIS CHANGES EVERYTHING | 22

Coming Out of Denial

Some say there is no time for this transformation; the crisis is too pressing and the
clock is ticking. I agree that it would be reckless to claim that the only solution to
this crisis is to revolutionize our economy and revamp our worldview from the
bottom up — and anything short of that is not worth doing. There are all kinds of
measures that would lower emissions substantively that could and should be done
right now. But we aren't taking those measures, are we? The reason is that by
failing to fight these big battles that stand to shift our ideological direction and
change the balance of who holds power in our societies, a context has been slowly
created in which any muscular response to climate change seems politically
impossible, especially during times of economic crisis (which lately seems to be
all the time).

So this book proposes a different strategy: think big, go deep, and move the
ideological pole far away from the stifling market fundamentalism that has become
the greatest enemy to planetary health. If we can shift the cultural context even a
little, then there will be some breathing room for those sensible reformist policies
that will at least get the atmospheric carbon numbers moving in the right direction.
And winning is contagious so, who knows? Maybe within a few years, some of the
ideas highlighted in these pages that sound impossibly radical today — like a basic
income for all, or a rewriting of trade law, or real recognition of the rights of
Indigenous people to protect huge parts of the world from polluting extraction —
will start to seem reasonable, even essential.

For a quarter of a century, we have tried the approach of polite incremental
change, attempting to bend the physical needs of the planet to our economic
model's need for constant growth and new profit-making opportunities. The results
have been disastrous, leaving us all in a great deal more danger than when the
experiment began.

There are, of course, no guarantees that a more systemic approach will be any
more successful — though there are, as will be explored later on, historical
precedents that are grounds for hope. The truth is that this is the hardest book I
have ever written, precisely because the research has led me to search out such
radical responses. I have no doubt of their necessity, but I question their political
feasibility every day, especially given that climate change puts us on such a tight
and unforgiving deadline.

THIS CHANGES EVERYTHING | 23

It's been a harder book to write for personal reasons too.

What gets me most are not the scary scientific studies about melting glaciers,
the ones I used to avoid. It's the books I read to my two-year-old. Have You Ever
Seen a Moose? is one of his favorites. It's about a bunch of kids that really, really,
really want to see a moose. They search high and low — through a forest, a swamp,
in brambly bushes and up a mountain, for "a long legged, bulgy nosed, branchy
antlered moose." The joke is that there are moose hiding on each page. In the end,
the animals all come out of hiding and the ecstatic kids proclaim: "We've never
ever seen so many moose!"

On about the seventy-fifth reading, it suddenly hit me: he might never see a
moose. I tried to hold it together. I went back to my computer and began to write
about my time in northern Alberta, tar sands country, where members of the Beaver
Lake Cree Nation told me about how the moose had changed — one woman
described killing a moose on a hunting trip only to find that the flesh had already
turned green. I heard a lot about strange tumors too, which locals assumed had to
do with the animals drinking water contaminated by tar sands toxins. But mostly I
heard about how the moose were simply gone.

And not just in Alberta. "Rapid Climate Changes Turn North Woods into Moose
Graveyard," reads a May 2012 headline mScientific American. A year and a half
later, The New York Timeswas reporting that one of Minnesota's two moose
populations had declined from four thousand in the 1990s to just one hundred

today.

Will he ever see a moose?

Then, the other day, I was slain by a miniature board book called Snuggle
Wuggle. It involves different animals cuddling, with each posture given a
ridiculously silly name: "How does a bat hug?" it asks. "Topsy turvy, topsy turvy."
For some reason my son reliably cracks up at this page. I explain that it means
upside down, because that's the way bats sleep.

But all I could think about was the report of some 100,000 dead and dying bats
raining down from the sky in the midst of record-breaking heat across part of

Queensland, Australia. Whole colonies devastated.
Will he ever see a bat?

I knew I was in trouble when the other day I found myself bargaining with
starfish. Red and purple ones are ubiquitous on the rocky coast of British Columbia
where my parents live, where my son was born, and where I have spent about half
of my adult life. They are always the biggest kid pleasers, because you can gently
pick one up and give it a really good look. "This is the best day of my life!" my

THIS CHANGES EVERYTHING | 24

seven-year-old niece Miriam, visiting from Chicago, proclaimed after a long
afternoon spent in the tide pools. But in the fall of 2013, stories began to appear
about a strange wasting disease that was causing starfish along the Pacific Coast
to die by the tens of thousands. Termed the "sea star wasting syndrome," multiple
species were disintegrating alive, their vibrant bodies melting into distorted globs,

with legs falling off and bodies caving in. Scientists were mystified.

As I read these stories, I caught myself praying for the invertebrates to hang in
for just one more year — long enough for my son to be amazed by them. Then I
doubted myself: maybe it's better if he never sees a starfish at all — certainly not
like this . . .

When fear like that used to creep through my armor of climate change denial, I
would do my utmost to stuff it away, change the channel, click past it. Now I try
to feel it. It seems to me that I owe it to my son, just as we all owe it to ourselves
and one another. But what should we do with this fear that comes from living on a
planet that is dying, made less alive every day? First, accept that it won't go away.
That it is a fully rational response to the unbearable reality that we are living in a
dying world, a world that a great many of us are helping to kill, by doing things
like making tea and driving to the grocery store and yes, okay, having kids.

Next, use it. Fear is a survival response. Fear makes us run, it makes us leap, it
can make us act superhuman. But we need somewhere to run to. Without that, the
fear is only paralyzing. So the real trick, the only hope, really, is to allow the terror
of an unlivable future to be balanced and soothed by the prospect of building
something much better than many of us have previously dared hope.

Yes, there will be things we will lose, luxuries some of us will have to give up,
whole industries that will disappear. And it's too late to stop climate change from
coming; it is already here, and increasingly brutal disasters are headed our way no
matter what we do. But it's not too late to avert the worst, and there is still time to
change ourselves so that we are far less brutal to one another when those disasters
strike. And that, it seems to me, is worth a great deal. Because the thing about a
crisis this big, this all-encompassing, is that it changes everything. It changes what
we can do, what we can hope for, what we can demand from ourselves and our
leaders. It means there is a whole lot of stuff that we have been told is inevitable
that simply cannot stand. And it means that a whole lot of stuff we have been told
is impossible has to start happening right away.

Can we pull it off? All I know is that nothing is inevitable. Nothing except that
climate change changes everything. And for a very brief time, the nature of that
change is still up to us.

THIS CHANGES EVERYTHING | 25

PART ONE
BAD TIMING

"Coal, in truth, stands not beside but entirely above all
other commodities. It is the material energy of the
country — the universal aid — the factor in everything we
do."

-William Stanley Jevons, economist, 1865 1

"How sad to think that nature speaks and mankind doesn't
listen."

-Victor Hugo, 1840 2

THIS CHANGES EVERYTHING | 26

THE RIGHT IS RIGHT

The Revolutionary Power of Climate Change

"Climate scientists agree: climate change is happening here and now.
Based on well-established evidence, about 97 percent of climate scientists
have concluded that human-caused climate change is happening. This
agreement is documented not just by a single study, but by a converging
stream of evidence over the past two decades from surveys of scientists,
content analyses of peer-reviewed studies, and public statements issued
by virtually every membership organization of experts in this field."

-Report by the American Association for the Advancement of Science, 20 14 1

"There is no way this can be done without fundamentally changing the
American way of life, choking off economic development, and putting
large segments of our economy out of business."

-Thomas J. Donohue, President of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, on

ambitious carbon reduction"

There is a question from a gentleman in the fourth row.

He introduces himself as Richard Rothschild. He tells the crowd that he ran for
county commissioner in Maryland's Carroll County because he had come to the
conclusion that policies to combat global warming were actually "an attack on
middle-class American capitalism." His question for the panelists, gathered in a
Washington, D.C., Marriott, is: "To what extent is this entire movement simply a

green Trojan horse, whose belly is full with red Marxist socioeconomic doctrine?"

At the Heartland Institute's Sixth International Conference on Climate Change,
held in late June 2011, the premier gathering for those dedicated to denying the
overwhelming scientific consensus that human activity is warming the planet, this
qualifies as a rhetorical question. Like asking a meeting of German central bankers

THIS CHANGES EVERYTHING | 27

if Greeks are untrustworthy. Still, the panelists aren't going to pass up an
opportunity to tell the questioner just how right he is.

First up is Marc Morano, editor of the denialists' go- to news site Climate Depot.
"In America today we are regulated down to our shower heads, to our light bulbs,
to our washing machines," he says. And "we're allowing the American SUV to die
right before our eyes." If the greens have their way, Morano warns, we will be

looking at "a CO2 budget for every man, woman, and child on the planet,

monitored by an international body."

Next is Chris Horner, a senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute who
specializes in harassing climate scientists with burdensome lawsuits and Freedom
of Information Act fishing expeditions. He angles the table mic over to his mouth.
"You can believe this is about the climate," he says darkly, "and many people do,
but it's not a reasonable belief." Horner, whose prematurely silver hair makes him
look like Anderson Cooper's frat boy doppelganger, likes to invoke 1960s
counterculture icon Saul Alinsky: "The issue isn't the issue." The issue,
apparently, is that "no free society would do to itself what this agenda
requires.... The first step to [doing] that is to remove these nagging freedoms that
keep getting in the way." 5

Claiming that climate change is a plot to steal American freedom is rather tame
by Heartland standards. Over the course of this two-day conference, I will hear
modern environmentalism compared to virtually every mass-murderous chapter in
human history, from the Catholic Inquisition to Nazi Germany to Stalin's Russia.
I will learn that Barack Obama's campaign promise to support locally owned
biofuels refineries was akin to Chairman Mao's scheme to put "a pig iron furnace
in everybody's backyard" (the Cato Institute's Patrick Michaels). That climate
change is "a stalking horse for National Socialism" (former Republican senator
and retired astronaut Harrison Schmitt, referencing the Nazis). And that
environmentalists are like Aztec priests, sacrificing countless people to appease
the gods and change the weather (Marc Morano again). ~

But most of all, I will hear versions of the opinion expressed by the county
commissioner in the fourth row: that climate change is a Trojan horse designed to
abolish capitalism and replace it with some kind of "green communitarianism." As
conference speaker Larry Bell succinctly puts it in his bookClimate of Corruption,
climate change "has little to do with the state of the environment and much to do

with shackling capitalism and transforming the American way of life in the

interests of global wealth redistribution."

THIS CHANGES EVERYTHING | 28

Yes, there is a pretense that the delegates' rejection of climate science is rooted
in serious disagreement about the data. And the organizers go to some lengths to
mimic credible scientific conferences, calling the gathering "Restoring the
Scientific Method" and even choosing a name, the International Conference on
Climate Change, that produces an organizational acronym, ICCC, just one letter
off from that of the world's leading authority on climate change, the United
Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a collaboration of
thousands of scientists and 195 governments. But the various contrarian theses
presented at the Heartland conference — tree rings, sunspots, the Medieval Warm
Period — are old news and were thoroughly debunked long ago. And most of the
speakers are not even scientists but rather hobbyists: engineers, economists, and
lawyers, mixed in with a weatherman, an astronaut, and a "space architect" — all
convinced they have outsmarted 97 percent of the world's climate scientists with
their back-of-the-envelope calculations.

Australian geologist Bob Carter questions whether warming is happening at all,
while astrophysicist Willie Soon acknowledges some warming has occurred, but
says it has nothing to do with greenhouse emissions and is instead the result of
natural fluctuations in the activity of the sun. Cato's Patrick Michaels contradicts
them both by conceding that CO2 is indeed increasing temperatures, but insists the
impacts are so minor we should "do nothing" about it. Disagreement is the
lifeblood of any intellectual gathering, but at the Heartland conference, this wildly
contradictory material sparks absolutely no debate among the deniers — no one
attempts to defend one position over another, or to sort out who is actually correct.

Indeed as the temperature graphs are presented, several members of the mostly

elderly audience seem to doze off.

The entire room comes to life, however, when the rock stars of the movement
take the stage — not the C-team scientists but the A-team ideological warriors like
Morano and Horner. This is the true purpose of the gathering: providing a forum
for die-hard denialists to collect the rhetorical cudgels with which they will attempt
to club environmentalists and climate scientists in the weeks and months to come.
The talking points tested here will jam the comment sections beneath every article
and YouTube video that contains the phrase "climate change" or "global
warming." They will also fly from the mouths of hundreds of right-wing
commentators and politicians — from Republican presidential hopefuls all the way
down to county commissioners like Richard Rothschild. In an interview outside
the sessions, Joseph Bast, president of the Heartland Institute, takes credit for

THIS CHANGES EVERYTHING | 29

"thousands of articles and op-eds and speeches ... that were informed by or
motivated by somebody attending one of these conferences."^

More impressive, though left unspoken, are all the news stories that were never
published and never aired. The years leading up to the gathering had seen a
precipitous collapse of media coverage of climate change, despite a rise in extreme
weather: in 2007, the three major U.S. networks— CBS, NBC, and ABC— ran 147
stories on climate change; in 2011 the networks ran just fourteen stories on the
subject. That too is the denier strategy at work, because the goal was never just to
spread doubt but also to spread fear — to send a clear message that saying anything
at all about climate change was a surefire way to find your inbox and comment
threads jammed with a toxic strain of vitriol. 11

The Heartland Institute, a Chicago-based think tank devoted to "promoting free-
market solutions," has been holding these confabs since 2008, sometimes twice a
year. And at the time of the gathering, the strategy appeared to be working. In his
address, Morano — whose claim to fame is having broken the Swift Boat Veterans
for Truth story that helped sink John Kerry's 2004 presidential bid — led the
audience through a series of victory laps. Climate legislation in the U.S. Senate:
dead! The U.N. summit on climate change in Copenhagen: failure! The climate
movement: suicidal! He even projected on a screen a couple of quotes from climate
activists beating up on themselves (as progressives do so well) and exhorted the

audience to "celebrate!"
The only things missing were balloons and confetti descending from the rafters.

When public opinion on the big social and political issues changes, the trends tend
to be relatively gradual. Abrupt shifts, when they come, are usually precipitated by
dramatic events. Which is why pollsters were so surprised by what had happened
to perceptions about climate change in just four years. A 2007 Harris poll found
that 71 percent of Americans believed that the continued burning of fossil fuels
would alter the climate. By 2009 the figure had dropped to 51 percent. In June
201 1 the number was down to 44 percent — well under half the population. Similar
trends have been tracked in the U.K. and Australia. Scott Keeter, director of survey
research at the Pew Research Center for People & the Press, described the
statistics in the United States as "among the largest shifts over a short period of

time seen in recent public opinion history."

The overall belief in climate change has rebounded somewhat since its 2010-1 1
low in the United States. (Some have hypothesized that experience with extreme

THIS CHANGES EVERYTHING | 30

weather events could be contributing, though "the evidence is at best very sketchy
at this point," says Riley Dunlap, a sociologist at Oklahoma State University who
specializes in the politics of climate change.) But what remains striking is that on

the right-wing side of the political spectrum, the numbers are still way down.

It seems hard to believe today, but as recently as 2008, tackling climate change
still had a veneer of bipartisan support, even in the United States. That year,
Republican stalwart Newt Gingrich did a TV spot with Democratic
congresswoman Nancy Pelosi, then Speaker of the House, in which they pledged
to join forces and fight climate change together. And in 2007, Rupert Murdoch —
whose Fox News channel relentlessly amplifies the climate change denial
movement — launched an incentive program at Fox to encourage employees to buy
hybrid cars (Murdoch announced he had purchased one himself).

Those days of bipartisanship are decidedly over. Today, more than 75 percent
of self-identified Democrats and liberals believe humans are changing the
climate — a level that, despite yearly fluctuations, has risen only slightly since
2001. In sharp contrast, Republicans have overwhelmingly chosen to reject the
scientific consensus. In some regions, only about 20 percent of self-identified
Republicans accept the science. This political rift can also be found in Canada.
According to an October 2013 poll conducted by Environics, only 41 percent of
respondents who identify with the ruling Conservative Party believe that climate
change is real and human-caused, while 76 percent of supporters of the left-leaning
New Democratic Party and 69 percent of supporters of the centrist Liberal Party
believe it is real. And the same phenomenon has once again been documented in
Australia and the U.K., as well as Western Europe.

Ever since this political divide opened up over climate change, a great deal of
social science research has been devoted to pinpointing precisely how and why
political beliefs are shaping attitudes toward global warming. According to Yale's
Cultural Cognition Project, for example, one's "cultural worldview" — that would
be political leanings or ideological outlook to the rest of us — explains "individuals'
beliefs about global warming more powerfully than any other individual
characteristic." More powerfully, that is, than age, ethnicity, education, or party
affiliation.

The Yale researchers explain that people with strong "egalitarian" and
"communitarian" worldviews (marked by an inclination toward collective action
and social justice, concern about inequality, and suspicion of corporate power)
overwhelmingly accept the scientific consensus on climate change. Conversely,
those with strong "hierarchical" and "individualistic" worldviews (marked by

THIS CHANGES EVERYTHING | 31

opposition to government assistance for the poor and minorities, strong support for
industry, and a belief that we all pretty much get what we deserve) overwhelmingly

reject the scientific consensus. The evidence is striking. Among the segment of
the U.S. population that displays the strongest "hierarchical" views, only 11
percent rate climate change as a "high risk," compared with 69 percent of the

1 8

segment displaying the strongest "egalitarian" views.

Yale law professor Dan Kahan, the lead author on this study, attributes the tight
correlation between "worldview" and acceptance of climate science to "cultural
cognition," the process by which all of us — regardless of political leanings — filter
new information in ways that will protect our "preferred vision of the good
society." If new information seems to confirm that vision, we welcome it and
integrate it easily. If it poses a threat to our belief system, then our brain
immediately gets to work producing intellectual antibodies designed to repel the
unwelcome invasion.^

As Kahan explained in Nature, "People find it disconcerting to believe that
behavior that they find noble is nevertheless detrimental to society, and behavior
that they find base is beneficial to it. Because accepting such a claim could drive a
wedge between them and their peers, they have a strong emotional predisposition
to reject it." In other words, it is always easier to deny reality than to allow our
worldview to be shattered, a fact that was as true of die-hard Stalinists at the height
of the purges as it is of libertarian climate change deniers today. Furthermore,
leftists are equally capable of denying inconvenient scientific evidence. If
conservatives are inherent system justifiers, and therefore bridle before facts that
call the dominant economic system into question, then most leftists are inherent
system questioners, and therefore prone to skepticism about facts that come from
corporations and government. This can lapse into the kind of fact resistance we see
among those who are convinced that multinational drug companies have covered
up the link between childhood vaccines and autism. No matter what evidence is
marshaled to disprove their theories, it doesn't matter to these crusaders — it's just
the system covering up for itself.

This kind of defensive reasoning helps explain the rise of emotional intensity
that surrounds the climate issue today. As recently as 2007, climate change was
something most everyone acknowledged was happening — they just didn't seem to
care very much. (When Americans are asked to rank their political concerns in

order of priority, climate change still consistently comes in last.)

But today there is a significant cohort of voters in many countries who care
passionately, even obsessively, about climate change. What they care about,

THIS CHANGES EVERYTHING | 32

however, is exposing it as a "hoax" being perpetrated by liberals to force them to
change their light bulbs, live in Soviet- style tenements, and surrender their SUVs.
For these right-wingers, opposition to climate change has become as central to
their belief system as low taxes, gun ownership, and opposition to abortion. Which
is why some climate scientists report receiving the kind of harassment that used to
be reserved for doctors who perform abortions. In the Bay Area of California, local
Tea Party activists have disrupted municipal meetings when minor sustainability
strategies are being discussed, claiming they are part of a U.N.-sponsored plot to
usher in world government. As Heather Gass of the East Bay Tea Party put it in an
open letter after one such gathering: "One day (in 2035) you will wake up in
subsidized government housing, eating government subsidized food, your kids will
be whisked off by government buses to indoctrination training centers while you
are working at your government assigned job on the bottom floor of your urban
transit center village because you have no car and who knows where your aging
parents will be but by then it will be too late! WAKE UP! ! ! I" 22

Clearly there is something about climate change that has some people feeling
very threatened indeed.

Unthinkable Truths

Walking past the lineup of tables set up by the Heartland conference's sponsors,
it's not terribly hard to see what's going on. The Heritage Foundation is hawking
reports, as are the Cato Institute and the Ayn Rand Institute. The climate change
denial movement — far from an organic convergence of "skeptical" scientists — is
entirely a creature of the ideological network on display here, the very one that
deserves the bulk of the credit for redrawing the global ideological map over the
last four decades. A 2013 study by Riley Dunlap and political scientist Peter
Jacques found that a striking 72 percent of climate denial books, mostly published
since the 1990s, were linked to right-wing think tanks, a figure that rises to 87

percent if self-published books (increasingly common) are excluded.

Many of these institutions were created in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when
U.S. business elites feared that public opinion was turning dangerously against
capitalism and toward, if not socialism, then an aggressive Keynesianism. In
response, they launched a counterrevolution, a richly funded intellectual
movement that argued that greed and the limitless pursuit of profit were nothing
to apologize for and offered the greatest hope for human emancipation that the

THIS CHANGES EVERYTHING | 33

world had ever known. Under this liberationist banner, they fought for such
policies as tax cuts, free trade deals, for the auctioning off of core state assets from
phones to energy to water — the package known in most of the world as
"neoliberalism."

At the end of the 1980s, after a decade of Margaret Thatcher at the helm in the
U.K. and Ronald Reagan in the United States, and with communism collapsing,
these ideological warriors were ready to declare victory: history was officially over
and there was, in Thatcher's often repeated words, "no alternative" to their market
fundamentalism. Filled with confidence, the next task was to systematically lock
in the corporate liberation project in every country that had previously held out,
which was usually best accomplished in the midst of political turmoil and large-
scale economic crises, and further entrenched through free trade agreements and
membership in the World Trade Organization.

It had all been going so well. The project had even managed to survive, more or
less, the 2008 financial collapse directly caused by a banking sector that had been
liberated of so much burdensome regulation and oversight. But to those gathered
here at the Heartland conference, climate change is a threat of a different sort. It
isn't about the political preferences of Republicans versus Democrats; it's about
the physical boundaries of the atmosphere and ocean. If the dire projections
coming out of the IPCC are left unchallenged, and business as usual is indeed
driving us straight toward civilization-threatening tipping points, then the
implications are obvious: the ideological crusade incubated in think tanks like
Heartland, Cato, and Heritage will have to come to a screeching halt. Nor have the
various attempts to soft-pedal climate action as compatible with market logic
(carbon trading, carbon offsets, monetizing nature's "services") fooled these true
believers one bit. They know very well that ours is a global economy created by,
and fully reliant upon, the burning of fossil fuels and that a dependency that
foundational cannot be changed with a few gentle market mechanisms. It requires
heavy-duty interventions: sweeping bans on polluting activities, deep subsidies for
green alternatives, pricey penalties for violations, new taxes, new public works
programs, reversals of privatizations — the list of ideological outrages goes on and
on. Everything, in short, that these think tanks — which have always been public
proxies for far more powerful corporate interests — have been busily attacking for
decades.

And there is also the matter of "global equity" that keeps coming up in the
climate negotiations. The equity debate is based on the simple scientific fact that
global warming is caused by the accumulation of greenhouse gases in the

THIS CHANGES EVERYTHING | 34

atmosphere over two centuries. That means that the countries that got a large head
start on industrialization have done a great deal more emitting than most others.
And yet many of the countries that have emitted least are getting hit by the impacts
of climate change first and worst (the result of geographical bad luck as well as the
particular vulnerabilities created by poverty). To address this structural inequity
sufficiently to persuade fast- growing countries like China and India not to
destabilize the global climate system, earlier emitters, like North America and
Europe, will have to take a greater share of the burden at first. And there will
obviously need to be substantial transfers of resources and technology to help
battle poverty using low carbon tools. This is what Bolivia's climate negotiator
Angelica Navarro Llanos meant when she called for a Marshall Plan for the Earth.
And it is this sort of wealth redistribution that represents the direst of thought
crimes at a place like the Heartland Institute.

Even climate action at home looks suspiciously like socialism to them; all the
calls for high-density affordable housing and brand-new public transit are
obviously just ways to give backdoor subsidies to the undeserving poor. Never
mind what this war on carbon means to the very premise of global free trade, with
its insistence that geographical distance is a mere fiction to be collapsed by
Walmart's diesel trucks and Maersk's container ships.

More fundamentally than any of this, though, is their deep fear that if the free
market system really has set in motion physical and chemical processes that, if
allowed to continue unchecked, threaten large parts of humanity at an existential
level, then their entire crusade to morally redeem capitalism has been for naught.
With stakes like these, clearly greed is not so very good after all. And that is what
is behind the abrupt rise in climate change denial among hardcore conservatives:
they have come to understand that as soon as they admit that climate change is
real, they will lose the central ideological battle of our time — whether we need to
plan and manage our societies to reflect our goals and values, or whether that task
can be left to the magic of the market.

Imagine, for a moment, how all of this looks to a guy like Heartland president
Joseph Bast, a genial bearded fellow who studied economics at the University of
Chicago and who told me in a sit-down interview that his personal calling is

"freeing people from the tyranny of other people." To Bast, climate action looks
like the end of the world. It's not, or at least it doesn't have to be, but, for all intents
and purposes, robust, science-based emission reduction is the end of his world.
Climate change detonates the ideological scaffolding on which contemporary
conservatism rests. A belief system that vilifies collective action and declares war

THIS CHANGES EVERYTHING | 35

on all corporate regulation and all things public simply cannot be reconciled with
a problem that demands collective action on an unprecedented scale and a dramatic
reining in of the market forces that are largely responsible for creating and
deepening the crisis.

And for many conservatives, particularly religious ones, the challenge goes
deeper still, threatening not just faith in markets but core cultural narratives about
what humans are doing here on earth. Are we masters, here to subdue and
dominate, or are we one species among many, at the mercy of powers more
complex and unpredictable than even our most powerful computers can model? As
Robert Manne, a professor of politics at La Trobe University in Melbourne, puts
it, climate science is for many conservatives "an affront to their deepest and most
cherished basic faith: the capacity and indeed the right of 'mankind' to subdue the
Earth and all its fruits and to establish a 'mastery' over Nature." For these
conservatives, he notes, "such a thought is not merely mistaken. It is intolerable
and deeply offensive. Those preaching this doctrine have to be resisted and indeed

denounced."

And denounce they do, the more personal, the better — whether it's former Vice
President Al Gore for his mansions, or famed climate scientist James Hansen for
his speaking fees. Then there is "Climategate," a manufactured scandal in which
climate scientists' emails were hacked and their contents distorted by the
Heartlanders and their allies, who claimed to find evidence of manipulated data
(the scientists were repeatedly vindicated of wrongdoing). In 2012, the Heartland
Institute even landed itself in hot water by running a billboard campaign that
compared people who believe in climate change ("warmists" in denialist lingo) to
murderous cult leader Charles Manson and Unabomber Ted Kaczynski. "I still
believe in Global Warming. Do you?" the first ad demanded in bold red letters
under a picture of Kaczynski. For Heartlanders, denying climate science is part of
a war, and they act like it.

Many deniers are quite open about the fact that their distrust of the science grew
out of a powerful fear that if climate change is real, the political implications would
be catastrophic. As British blogger and regular Heartland speaker James
Delingpole has pointed out, "Modern environmentalism successfully advances
many of the causes dear to the left: redistribution of wealth, higher taxes, greater
government intervention, regulation." Heartland president Joseph Bast puts it even
more bluntly. For the left, "Climate change is the perfect thing.... It's the reason

why we should do everything [the left] wanted to do anyway."^

THIS CHANGES EVERYTHING | 36

Bast, who has little of the swagger common to so many denialists, is equally
honest about the fact he and his colleagues did not become engaged with climate
issues because they found flaws in the scientific facts. Rather, they became
alarmed about the economic and political implications of those facts and set out to
disprove them. "When we look at this issue, we say, This is a recipe for massive
increase in government," Bast told me, concluding that, "Before we take this step,
let's take another look at the science. So conservative and libertarian groups, I
think, stopped and said, Let's not simply accept this as an article of faith; let's

actually do our own research."

Nigel Lawson, Margaret Thatcher's former chancellor of the exchequer who has
taken to declaring that "green is the new red," has followed a similar intellectual
trajectory. Lawson takes great pride in having privatized key British assets,
lowered taxes on the wealthy, and broken the power of large unions. But climate
change creates, in his words, "a new license to intrude, to interfere and to regulate."
It must, he concludes, be a conspiracy — the classic teleological reversal of cause

and effect.

The climate change denial movement is littered with characters who are twisting
themselves in similar intellectual knots. There are the old-timer physicists like S.
Fred Singer, who used to develop rocket technologies for the U.S. military and
who hears in emissions regulation a distorted echo of the communism he fought
during the Cold War (as documented compellingly by Naomi Oreskes and Erik
Conway in Merchants of Doubt). In a similar vein, there is former Czech president
Vaclav Klaus, who spoke at a Heartland climate conference while still head of
state. For Klaus, whose career began under communist rule, climate change
appears to have induced a full-fledged Cold War flashback. He compares attempts
to prevent global warming to "the ambitions of communist central planners to
control the entire society" and says, "For someone who spent most of his life in

the 'noble' era of communism this is impossible to accept."

And you can understand that, from their perspective, the scientific reality of
climate change must seem spectacularly unfair. After all, the people at the
Heartland conference thought they had won these ideological wars — if not fairly,
then certainly squarely. Now climate science is changing everything: how can you
win an argument against government intervention if the very habitability of the
planet depends on intervening? In the short term, you might be able to argue that
the economic costs of taking action are greater than allowing climate change to
play out for a few more decades (and some neoliberal economists, using cost-
benefit calculations and future "discounting," are busily making those arguments).

THIS CHANGES EVERYTHING | 37

But most people don't actually like it when their children's lives are "discounted"
in someone else's Excel sheet, and they tend to have a moral aversion to the idea
of allowing countries to disappear because saving them would be too expensive.

Which is why the ideological warriors gathered at the Marriott have concluded
that there is really only one way to beat a threat this big: by claiming that thousands
upon thousands of scientists are lying and that climate change is an elaborate hoax.
That the storms aren't really getting bigger, it's just our imagination. And if they
are, it's not because of anything humans are doing — or could stop doing. They
deny reality, in other words, because the implications of that reality are, quite
simply, unthinkable. So here's my inconvenient truth: I think these hard-core
ideologues understand the real significance of climate change better than most of
the "warmists" in the political center, the ones who are still insisting that the
response can be gradual and painless and that we don't need to go to war with
anybody, including the fossil fuel companies. Before I go any further, let me be
absolutely clear: as 97 percent of the world's climate scientists attest, the
Heartlanders are completely wrong about the science. But when it comes to the
political and economicconsequences of those scientific findings, specifically the
kind of deep changes required not just to our energy consumption but to the
underlying logic of our liberalized and profit- seekingeconomy, they have their
eyes wide open. The deniers get plenty of the details wrong (no, it's not a
communist plot; authoritarian state socialism, as we will see, was terrible for the
environment and brutally extractivist), but when it comes to the scope and depth
of change required to avert catastrophe, they are right on the money.

About That Money ...

When powerful ideologies are challenged by hard evidence from the real world,
they rarely die off completely. Rather, they become cultlike and marginal. A few
of the faithful always remain to tell one another that the problem wasn't with the
ideology; it was the weakness of leaders who did not apply the rules with sufficient
rigor. (Lord knows there is still a smattering of such grouplets on the neo-Stalinist
far left.) By this point in history — after the 2008 collapse of Wall Street and in the
midst of layers of ecological crises — free market fundamentalists should, by all
rights, be exiled to a similarly irrelevant status, left to fondle their copies of Milton
Friedman's Free to Chooseand Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged in obscurity. They are
saved from this ignominious fate only because their ideas about corporate

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liberation, no matter how demonstrably at war with reality, remain so profitable to
the world' s billionaires that they are kept fed and clothed in think tanks by the likes
of Charles and David Koch, owners of the diversified dirty energy giant Koch
Industries, and ExxonMobil.

According to one recent study, for instance, the denial-espousing think tanks and
other advocacy groups making up what sociologist Robert Brulle calls the "climate
change counter-movement" are collectively pulling in more than $900 million per
year for their work on a variety of right-wing causes, most of it in the form of "dark

money" — funds from conservative foundations that cannot be fully traced.

This points to the limits of theories like cultural cognition that focus exclusively
on individual psychology. The deniers are doing more than protecting their
personal worldviews — they are protecting powerful political and economic
interests that have gained tremendously from the way Heartland and others have
clouded the climate debate. The ties between the deniers and those interests are
well known and well documented. Heartlandhas received more than $1 million
from ExxonMobil together with foundations linked to the Koch brothers and the
late conservative funder Richard Mellon Scaife. Just how much money the think
tank receives from companies, foundations, and individuals linked to the fossil fuel
industry remains unclear because Heartland does not publish the names of its
donors, claiming the information would distract from the "merits of our positions."
Indeed, leaked internal documents revealed that one of Heartland's largest donors
is anonymous — a shadowy individual who has given more than $8.6 million

specifically to support the think tank's attacks on climate science.

Meanwhile, scientists who present at Heartland climate conferences are almost
all so steeped in fossil fuel dollars that you can practically smell the fumes. To cite
just two examples, the Cato Institute's Patrick Michaels, who gave the 2011
conference keynote, once told CNN that 40 percent of his consulting company' s
income comes from oil companies (Cato itself has received funding from
ExxonMobil and Koch family foundations). A Greenpeace investigation into
another conference speaker, astrophysicist Willie Soon, found that between 2002
and 2010, 100 percent of his new research grants had come from fossil fuel

interests.

The people paid to amplify the views of these scientists — in blogs, op-eds, and
television appearances — are bankrolled by many of the same sources. Money from
big oil funds the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow, which houses Marc
Morano's website, just as it funds the Competitive Enterprise Institute, one of
Chris Horner's intellectual homes. A February 2013 report in The

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Guardian revealed that between 2002 and 2010, a network of anonymous U.S.
billionaires had donated nearly $120 million to "groups casting doubt about the
science behind climate change . . . the ready stream of cash set off a conservative
backlash against Barack Obama's environmental agenda that wrecked any chance

of Congress taking action on climate change."

There is no way of knowing exactly how this money shapes the views of those
who receive it or whether it does at all. We do know that having a significant
economic stake in the fossil fuel economy makes one more prone to deny the
reality of climate change, regardless of political affiliation. For example, the only
parts of the U.S. where opinions about climate change are slightly less split along
political lines are regions that are highly dependent on fossil fuel extraction — such
as Appalachian coal country and the Gulf Coast. There, Republicans still
overwhelmingly deny climate change, as they do across the country, but many of
their Democratic neighbors do as well (in parts of Appalachia, just 49 percent of
Democrats believe in human-created climate change, compared with 72-77
percent in other parts of the country). Canada has the same kinds of regional splits:
in Alberta, where incomes are soaring thanks to the tar sands, only 41 percent of
residents told pollsters that humans are contributing to climate change. In Atlantic
Canada, which has seen far less extravagant benefits from fossil fuel extraction,

68 percent of respondents say that humans are warming the planet.

A similar bias can be observed among scientists. While 97 percent of active
climate scientists believe humans are a major cause of climate change, the numbers
are radically different among "economic geologists" — scientists who study natural
formations so that they can be commercially exploited by the extractive industries.
Only 47 percent of these scientists believe in human-caused climate change. The
bottom line is that we are all inclined to denial when the truth is too costly —
whether emotionally, intellectually, or financially. As Upton Sinclair famously
observed: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary
depends upon his not understanding it!"~

Plan B: Get Rich off a Warming World

One of the most interesting findings of the many recent studies on climate
perceptions is the clear connection between a refusal to accept the science of
climate change and social and economic privilege. Overwhelmingly, climate
change deniers are not only conservative but also white and male, a group with

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higher than average incomes. And they are more likely than other adults to be
highly confident in their views, no matter how demonstrably false. A much
discussed paper on this topic by sociologists Aaron McCright and Riley Dunlap
(memorably titled "Cool Dudes") found that as a group, conservative white men
who expressed strong confidence in their understanding of global warming were
almost six times as likely to believe climate change "will never happen" as the rest
of the adults surveyed. McCright and Dunlap offer a simple explanation for this
discrepancy: "Conservative white males have disproportionately occupied
positions of power within our economic system. Given the expansive challenge
that climate change poses to the industrial capitalist economic system, it should
not be surprising that conservative white males' strong system-justifying attitudes

would be triggered to deny climate change."

But deniers' relative economic and social privilege doesn't just give them more
to lose from deep social and economic change; it gives them reason to be more
sanguine about the risks of climate change should their contrarian views turn out
to be false. This occurred to me as I listened to yet another speaker at the Heartland
conference display what can only be described as an utter absence of empathy for
the victims of climate change. Larry Bell (the space architect) drew plenty of
laughs when he told the crowd that a little heat isn't so bad: "I moved to Houston
intentionally!" (Houston was, at that time, in the midst of what would turn out to
be Texas's worst single-year drought on record.) Australian geologist Bob Carter
offered that "the world actually does better from our human perspective in warmer
times." And Patrick Michaels said people worried about climate change should do
what the French did after the devastating 2003 heat wave across Europe killed
nearly fifteen thousand people in France alone: "they discovered Walmart and air-

conditioning."^

I listened to these zingers as an estimated thirteen million people in the Horn of
Africa faced starvation on parched land. What makes this callousness among
deniers possible is their firm belief that if they're wrong about climate science, a
few degrees of warming isn't something wealthy people in industrialized countries
have to worry much about. ("When it rains, we find shelter. When it's hot, we
find shade," Texas congressman Joe Barton explained at an energy and

environment subcommittee hearing.)

As for everyone else, well, they should stop looking for handouts and get busy
making money. (Never mind that the World Bank warned in a 2012 report that for
poor countries, the increased cost of storms, droughts, and flooding is already so
high that it "threatens to roll back decades of sustainable development.") When I

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asked Patrick Michaels whether rich countries have a responsibility to help poor
ones pay for costly adaptations to a warmer climate, he scoffed: There is no reason
to give resources to countries "because, for some reason, their political system is

incapable of adapting." The real solution, he claimed, was more free trade.

Michaels surely knows that free trade is hardly going to help islanders whose
countries are disappearing, just as he is doubtlessly aware that most people on the
planet who are hit hardest by heat and drought can't solve their problems by putting
a new AC system on their credit cards. And this is where the intersection between
extreme ideology and climate denial gets truly dangerous. It' s not simply that these
"cool dudes" deny climate science because it threatens to upend their dominance-
based worldview. It is that their dominance-based worldview provides them with
the intellectual tools to write off huge swaths of humanity, and indeed, to
rationalize profiting from the meltdown.

Recognizing the threat posed by this empathy-exterminating mind- set — which
the cultural theorists describe as "hierarchical" and "individualistic" — is a matter
of great urgency because climate change will test our moral character like little
before. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, in its bid to prevent the Environmental
Protection Agency from regulating carbon emissions, argued in a petition that in
the event of global warming, "populations can acclimatize to warmer climates via

a range of behavioral, physiological, and technological adaptations."

It is these adaptations that worry me most of all. Unless our culture goes through
some sort of fundamental shift in its governing values, how do we honestly think
we will "adapt" to the people made homeless and jobless by increasingly intense
and frequent natural disasters? How will we treat the climate refugees who arrive
on our shores in leaky boats? How will we cope as freshwater and food become
ever more scarce?

We know the answers because the process is already under way. The corporate
quest for natural resources will become more rapacious, more violent. Arable land
in Africa will continue to be seized to provide food and fuel to wealthier nations,
unleashing a new stage of neocolonial plunder layered on top of the most plundered
places on earth (as journalist Christian Parenti documents so well in Tropic of
Chaos). When heat stress and vicious storms wipe out small farms and fishing
villages, the land will be handed over to large developers for mega-ports, luxury
resorts, and industrial farms. Once self-sufficient rural residents will lose their
lands and be urged to move into increasingly crowded urban slums — for their own
protection, they will be told. Drought and famine will continue to be used as

pretexts to push genetically modified seeds, driving farmers further into debt.

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In the wealthier nations, we will protect our major cities with costly seawalls
and storm barriers while leaving vast areas of coastline that are inhabited by poor
and Indigenous people to the ravages of storms and rising seas. We may well do
the same on the planetary scale, deploying techno-fixes to lower global
temperatures that will pose far greater risks to those living in the tropics than in
the Global North (more on this later). And rather than recognizing that we owe a
debt to migrants forced to flee their lands as a result of our actions (and inactions),
our governments will build ever more high-tech fortresses and adopt even more
draconian anti-immigration laws. And, in the name of "national security," we will
intervene in foreign conflicts over water, oil, and arable land, or start those
conflicts ourselves. In short our culture will do what it is already doing, only with
more brutality and barbarism, because that is what our system is built to do.

In recent years, quite a number of major multinational corporations have begun
to speak openly about how climate change might impact their businesses, and
insurance companies closely track and discuss the increased frequency of major
disasters. The CEO of Swiss Re Americas admitted, for instance, that "What keeps
us up at night is climate change," while companies like Starbucks and Chipotle
have raised the alarm about how extreme weather may impact the availability of
key ingredients. In June 2014, the Risky Business project, led by billionaire and
former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg, as well as former U.S. treasury
secretary Henry Paulson and hedge fund founder and environmental philanthropist
Tom Steyer, warned that climate change would cost the U.S. economy billions of
dollars each year as a result of rising sea levels alone, and that the corporate world

must take such climate costs seriously.

This kind of talk is often equated with support for strong action to prevent
warming. It shouldn't be. Just because companies are willing to acknowledge the
probable effects of climate change does not mean they support the kinds of
aggressive measures that would significantly reduce those risks by keeping
warming below 2 degrees. In the U.S., for instance, the insurance lobby has been,
by far, the corporate sector most vocal about the mounting impacts, with the largest
companies employing teams of climate scientists to help them prepare for the
disasters to come. And yet the industry hasn't done much to push more aggressive
climate policy — on the contrary, many companies and trade groups have provided
substantial funding to the think tanks that created the climate change denial

movement. For some time, this seemingly contradictory dynamic played out
within different divisions of the Heartland Institute itself. The world's premier
climate denial institution houses something called the Center on Finance,

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Insurance, and Real Estate. Up until May 2012, it was pretty much a mouthpiece
for the insurance industry, headed by conservative Washington insider Eli Lehrer.
What made Lehrer different from his Heartland colleagues, however, is that he is
willing to state matter-of-factly, "Climate change is obviously real and obviously
caused to a significant extent by people. I don't really think there's room for

serious debate on either of those points."

So even as his Heartland colleagues were organizing global conferences
designed specifically to manufacture the illusion of a serious scientific debate,
Lehrer' s division was working with the insurance lobby to protect their bottom
lines in a future of climate chaos. According to Lehrer, "In general there was no
enormous conflict, day-to-day" between his work and that of his climate-change-

denying colleagues. That's because what many of the insurance companies
wanted from Heartland's advocacy was not action to prevent climate chaos but
rather policies that would safeguard or even increase their profits no matter the
weather. That means pushing government out of the subsidized insurance business,
giving companies greater freedom to raise rates and deductibles and to drop
customers in high-risk areas, as well as other "free market" measures.

Eventually, Lehrer split away from the Heartland Institute after the think tank
launched its billboard comparing people who believe in climate change to mass
murderers. Since climate change believers include the insurance companies that
were generously funding the Heartland Institute, that stunt didn't sit at all well.
Still, in an interview, Eli Lehrer was quick to stress that the differences were over
public relations, not policy. "The public policies that Heartland supported are

generally ones I still favor," he said. In truth the work was more or less
compatible. Heartland's denier division did its best to cast so much doubt on the
science that it helped to paralyze all serious attempts to regulate greenhouse
emissions, while the insurance arm pushed policies that would allow corporations
to stay profitable regardless of the real-world results of those emissions.

And this points to what really lies behind the casual attitude about climate
change, whether it is being expressed as disaster denialism or disaster capitalism.
Those involved feel free to engage in these high-stakes gambles because they
believe that they and theirs will be protected from the ravages in question, at least
for another generation or so.

On a large scale, many regional climate models do predict that wealthy
countries — most of which are located at higher latitudes — may experience some
economic benefits from a slightly warmer climate, from longer growing seasons
to access to shorter trade routes through the melting Arctic ice. At the same time,

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the wealthy in these regions are already finding ever more elaborate ways to protect
themselves from the coming weather extremes. Sparked by events like Superstorm
Sandy, new luxury real estate developments are marketing their gold-plated private
disaster infrastructure to would-be residents — everything from emergency lighting
to natural-gas-powered pumps and generators to thirteen-foot floodgates and
watertight rooms sealed "submarine-style," in the case of a new Manhattan
condominium. As Stephen G. Kliegerman, the executive director of development
marketing for Halstead Property, told The New York Times: "I think buyers would
happily pay to be relatively reassured they wouldn't be terribly inconvenienced in

case of a natural disaster."

Many large corporations, meanwhile, have their own backup generators to keep
their lights on through mass blackouts (as Goldman Sachs did during Sandy,
despite the fact that its power never actually went out); the capacity to fortify
themselves with their own sandbags (which Goldman also did ahead of Sandy);
and their own special teams of meteorologists (FedEx). Insurance companies in
the United States have even begun dispatching teams of private firefighters to their
high-end customers when their mansions in California and Colorado are threatened

by wildfires, a "concierge" service pioneered by AIG.

Meanwhile, the public sector continues to crumble, thanks in large part to the
hard work of the warriors here at the Heartland conference. These, after all, are the
fervent dismantlers of the state, whose ideology has eroded so many parts of the
public sphere, including disaster preparedness. These are the voices that have been
happy to pass on the federal budget crisis to the states and municipalities, which
in turn are coping with it by not repairing bridges or replacing fire trucks. The
"freedom" agenda that they are desperately trying to protect from scientific
evidence is one of the reasons that societies will be distinctly less prepared for
disasters when they come.

For a long time, environmentalists spoke of climate change as a great equalizer,
the one issue that affected everyone, rich or poor. It was supposed to bring us
together. Yet all signs are that it is doing precisely the opposite, stratifying us
further into a society of haves and have-nots, divided between those whose wealth
offers them a not insignificant measure of protection from ferocious weather, at
least for now, and those left to the mercy of increasingly dysfunctional states.

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The Meaner Side of Denial

As the effects of climate change become impossible to ignore, the crueler side of
the denial project — now lurking as subtext — will become explicit. It has already
begun. At the end of August 201 1, with large parts of the world still suffering under
record high temperatures, the conservative blogger Jim Geraghty published a piece
in The Philadelphia Inquirer arguing that climate change "will help the U.S.
economy in several ways and enhance, not diminish, the United States'
geopolitical power." He explained that since climate change will be hardest on
developing countries, "many potentially threatening states will find themselves in
much more dire circumstances." And this, he stressed, was a good thing: "Rather
than our doom, climate change could be the centerpiece of ensuring a second
consecutive American Century." Got that? Since people who scare Americans are
unlucky enough to live in poor, hot places, climate change will cook them, leaving

*50

the United States to rise like a phoenix from the flames of global warming.

Expect more of this monstrousness. As the world warms, the ideology so
threatened by climate science — the one that tells us it's everyone for themselves,
that victims deserve their fate, that we can master nature — will take us to a very
cold place indeed. And it will only get colder, as theories of racial superiority,
barely under the surface in parts of the denial movement, make a raging
comeback. 1 ^ 1 In the grossly unequal world this ideology has done so much to
intensify and lock in, these theories are not optional: they are necessary to justify
the hardening of hearts to the largely blameless victims of climate change in the
Global South and to the predominantly African American cities like New Orleans
that are most vulnerable in the Global North.

In a 2007 report on the security implications of climate change, copublished by
the Center for Strategic and International Studies, former CIA director R. James
Woolsey predicted that on a much warmer planet "altruism and generosity would

likely be blunted." We can already see that emotional blunting on display from
Arizona to Italy. Already, climate change is changing us, coarsening us. Each
massive disaster seems to inspire less horror, fewer telethons. Media commentators
speak of "compassion fatigue," as if empathy, and not fossil fuels, was the finite
resource.

As if to prove the point, after Hurricane Sandy devastated large parts of New
York and New Jersey, the Koch-backed organization Americans for Prosperity
(AFP) launched a campaign to block the federal aid package going to these states.
"We need to suck it up and be responsible for taking care of ourselves," said Steve

Lonegan, then director of AFP's New Jersey chapter.^

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And then there is Britain's Daily Mail newspaper. In the midst of the
extraordinary 2014 winter floods, the tabloid ran a front-page headline asking its
readers to sign a petition calling on the government "to divert some of the £11
billion a year spent on overseas aid to ease the suffering of British flood

victims." Within days, more than 200,000 people had signed onto the demand to
cut foreign aid in favor of local disaster relief. Of course Britain — the nation that
invented the coal-fired steam engine — has been emitting industrial levels of carbon
for longer than any nation on earth and therefore bears a particularly great
responsibility to increase, as opposed to claw back, foreign aid. But never mind
that. Screw the poor. Suck it up. Everyone for themselves.

Unless we radically change course, these are the values that will rule our stormy
future, even more than they already rule our present.

Coddling Conservatives

Some climate activists have attempted to sway deniers away from their hardened
positions, arguing that delaying climate action will only make the government
interventions required more extreme. The popular climate blogger Joe Romm, for
instance, writes that "if you hate government intrusion into people's lives, you'd
better stop catastrophic global warming, because nothing drives a country more
towards activist government than scarcity and deprivation.... Only Big
Government — which conservatives say they don't want — can relocate millions of
citizens, build massive levees, ration crucial resources like water and arable land,
mandate harsh and rapid reductions in certain kinds of energy — all of which will
be inevitable if we don't act now."~

It's true that catastrophic climate change would inflate the role of government
to levels that would likely disturb most thinking people, whether left or right. And
there are legitimate fears too of what some call "green fascism" — an
environmental crisis so severe that it becomes the pretext for authoritarian forces
to seize control in the name of restoring some kind of climate order. But it' s also
the case that there is no way to get cuts in emissions steep or rapid enough to avoid
those catastrophic scenarios without levels of government intervention that will
never be acceptable to right-wing ideologues.

This was not always so. If governments, including in the U.S., had started cutting
emissions back when the scientific consensus first solidified, the measures for
avoiding catastrophic warming would not have been nearly so jarring to the

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reigning economic model. For instance, the first major international gathering to
set specific targets for emission reductions was the World Conference on the
Changing Atmosphere, held in Toronto in 1988, with more than three hundred
scientists and policymakers from forty-six countries represented. The conference,
which set the groundwork for the Rio Earth Summit, was a breakthrough,
recommending that governments cut emissions by 20 percent below 1988 levels
by 2005. "If we choose to take on this challenge," remarked one scientist in
attendance, "it appears that we can slow the rate of change substantially, giving us
time to develop mechanisms so that the cost to society and the damage to
ecosystems can be minimized. We could alternatively close our eyes, hope for the
best, and pay the cost when the bill comes due."

If we had heeded this advice and got serious about meeting that goal
immediately after the 1992 signing of the U.N. climate convention in Rio, the
world would have needed to reduce its carbon emissions by about 2 percent per

year until 2005. At that rate, wealthy countries could have much more
comfortably started rolling out the technologies to replace fossil fuels, cutting
carbon at home while helping to launch an ambitious green transition throughout
the world. Since this was before the globalization juggernaut took hold, it would
have created an opportunity for China and India and other fast-growing economies
to battle poverty on low-carbon pathways. (Which was the stated goal of
"sustainable development" as championed in Rio.)

Indeed this vision could have been built into the global trade architecture that
would rise up in the early to mid-1990s. If we had continued to reduce our
emissions at that pace we would have been on track for a completely de-carbonized
global economy by mid-century.

But we didn't do any of those things. And as the famed climate scientist Michael
Mann, director of the Penn State Earth System Science Center, puts it, "There's a
huge procrastination penalty when it comes to emitting carbon into the
atmosphere": the longer we wait, the more it builds up, the more dramatically we
must change to reduce the risks of catastrophic warming. Kevin Anderson, deputy
director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, further explains:
"Perhaps at the time of the 1992 Earth Summit, or even at the turn of the
millennium, 2°C levels of mitigation could have been achieved through significant
evolutionary changes within the political and economic hegemony. But climate
change is a cumulative issue! Now, in 2013, we in high-emitting (post)industrial
nations face a very different prospect. Our ongoing and collective carbon
profligacy has squandered any opportunity for the 'evolutionary change' afforded

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by our earlier (and larger) 2°C carbon budget. Today, after two decades of bluff
and lies, the remaining 2°C budget demands revolutionary change to the political

and economic hegemony."

Put a little more simply: for more than two decades, we kicked the can down the
road. During that time, we also expanded the road from a two-lane carbon- spewing
highway to a six-lane superhighway. That feat was accomplished in large part
thanks to the radical and aggressive vision that called for the creation of a single
global economy based on the rules of free market fundamentalism, the very rules
incubated in the right-wing think tanks now at the forefront of climate change
denial. There is a certain irony at work: it is the success of their own revolution
that makes revolutionary levels of transformation to the market system now our
best hope of avoiding climate chaos.

Some are advancing a different strategy to bring right-wingers back into the
climate fold. Rather than trying to scare them with scenarios of interventionist
governments if we procrastinate further, this camp argues that we need approaches
to emission reduction that are less offensive to conservative values.

Yale's Dan Kahan points out that while those who poll as highly "hierarchical"
and "individualist" bridle at any mention of regulation, they tend to like big,
centralized technologies that do not challenge their belief that humans can
dominate nature. In one of his studies, Kahan and his colleagues polled subjects
on their views about climate change after showing some of them fake news stories.
Some of the subjects were given a story about how global warming could be solved
through "anti-pollution" measures. Others were given a story that held up nuclear
power as the solution. Some were shown no story at all. The scientific facts about
global warming were identical in all news stories. The researchers discovered that
hard-core conservatives who received the nuclear solution story were more open
to the scientific facts proving that humans are changing the climate. However,
those who received the story about fighting pollution "were even more skeptical
about these facts than were hierarchs and individualists in a control group that
received no newspaper story."~

It's not hard to figure out why. Nuclear is a heavy industrial technology, based
on extraction, run in a corporatist manner, with long ties to the military-industrial
complex. And as renowned psychiatrist and author Robert Jay Lifton has noted,
no technology does more to confirm the notion that man has tamed nature than the
ability to split the atom.

THIS CHANGES EVERYTHING | 49

Based on this research, Kahan and others argue, environmentalists should sell
climate action by playing up concerns about national security and emphasizing
responses such as nuclear power and "geoengineering" — global-scale
technological interventions that would attempt to reverse rapid warming by, for
instance, blocking a portion of the sun's rays, or by "fertilizing" the oceans so that
they trap more carbon, among other untested, extraordinarily high-risk schemes.
Kahan reasons that since climate change is perceived by many on the right as a
gateway to dreaded anti-industry policies, the solution is "to remove what makes
it threatening." In a similar vein, Irina Feygina and John T. Jost, who have
conducted parallel research at NYU, advise policymakers to package
environmental action as being about protecting "our way of life" and a form of
patriotism, something they revealingly call "system-sanctioned change."

This kind of advice has been enormously influential. For instance, the
Breakthrough Institute — a think tank that specialized in attacking grassroots
environmentalism for its supposed lack of "modernity" — is forever charting this
self-styled middle path, pushing nuclear power, fracked natural gas, and
genetically modified crops as climate solutions, while attacking renewable energy
programs. And as we will see later on, some greens are even warming up to

geoengineering. Moreover, in the name of reaching across the aisle, green groups
are constantly "refraining" climate action so that it is about pretty much anything
other than preventing catastrophic warming to protect life on earth. Instead climate
action is about all the things conservatives are supposed to care about more than
that, from cutting off revenues to Arab states to reasserting American economic
dominance over China.

The first problem with this strategy is that it doesn't work: this has been the core
messaging for many large U.S. green groups for five years ("Forget about climate
change," counsels Jonathan Foley, director of the Institute on the Environment at

the University of Minnesota. "Do you love America?" ) And as we have seen,
conservative opposition to climate action has only hardened in this period.

The far more troubling problem with this approach is that rather than challenging
the warped values fueling both disaster denialism and disaster capitalism, it
actively reinforces those values. Nuclear power and geoengineering are not
solutions to the ecological crisis; they are a doubling down on exactly the kind of
reckless, short-term thinking that got us into this mess. Just as we spewed
greenhouse gases into the atmosphere thinking that tomorrow would never come,
both of these hugely high-risk technologies would create even more dangerous
forms of waste, and neither has a discernible exit strategy (subjects that I will be

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exploring in greater depth later on). Hyper-patriotism, similarly, is an active barrier
to coming up with any kind of global climate agreement, since it further pits
countries against one another rather than encouraging them to cooperate. As for
pitching climate action as a way to protect America's high-consumerist "way of
life" — that is either dishonest or delusional because a way of life based on the
promise of infinite growth cannot be protected, least of all exported to every corner
of the globe.

The Battle of Worldviews

I am well aware that all of this raises the question of whether I am doing the same
thing as the deniers — rejecting possible solutions because they threaten my
ideological worldview. As I outlined earlier, I have long been greatly concerned
about the science of global warming — but I was propelled into a deeper
engagement with it partly because I realized it could be a catalyst for forms of
social and economic justice in which I already believed.

But there are a few important differences to note. First, I am not asking anyone
to take my word on the science; I think that all of us should take the word of 97
percent of climate scientists and their countless peer-reviewed articles, as well as
every national academy of science in the world, not to mention establishment
institutions like the World Bank and the International Energy Agency, all of which
are telling us we are headed toward catastrophic levels of warming. Nor am I
suggesting that the kind of equity-based responses to climate change that I favor
are inevitable results of the science.

What I am saying is that the science forces us to choose how we want to respond.
If we stay on the road we are on, we will get the big corporate, big military, big
engineering responses to climate change — the world of a tiny group of big
corporate winners and armies of locked-out losers that we have imagined in
virtually every fictional account of our dystopic future, fromMad Max to The
Children of Men to The Hunger Games to Elysium.Or we can choose to heed
climate change's planetary wake-up call and change course, steer away not just
from the emissions cliff but from the logic that brought us careening to that
precipice. Because what the "moderates" constantly trying to reframe climate
action as something more palatable are really asking is: How can we create change
so that the people responsible for the crisis do not feel threatened by the solutions?
How, they ask, do you reassure members of a panicked, megalomaniacal elite that

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they are still masters of the universe, despite the overwhelming evidence to the
contrary? The answer is: you don't. You make sure you have enough people on
your side to change the balance of power and take on those responsible, knowing
that true populist movements always draw from both the left and the right. And
rather than twisting yourself in knots trying to appease a lethal worldview, you set
out to deliberately strengthen those values ("egalitarian" and "communitarian" as
the cultural cognition studies cited here describe them) that are currently being
vindicated, rather than refuted, by the laws of nature.

Culture, after all, is fluid. It has changed many times before and can change
again. The delegates at the Heartland conference understand this, which is why
they are so determined to suppress the mountain of evidence proving that their
worldview is a threat to life on earth. The task for the rest of us is to believe, based
on that same evidence, that a very different worldview can be our salvation.

The Heartlanders understand that culture can shift quickly because they are part
of a movement that did just that. "Economics are the method," Margaret Thatcher
said, "the object is to change the heart and soul." It was a mission largely
accomplished. To cite just one example, in 1966, a survey of U.S. college freshmen
found that only about 44 percent of them said that making a lot of money was "very

important" or "essential." By 2013, the figure had jumped to 82 percent.

It's enormously telling that as far back as 1998, when the American Geophysical
Union (AGU) convened a series of focus groups designed to gauge attitudes
toward global warming, it discovered that "Many respondents in our focus groups
were convinced that the underlying cause of environmental problems (such as
pollution and toxic waste) is a pervasive climate of rampant selfishness and greed,
and since they see this moral deterioration to be irreversible, they feel that
environmental problems are unsolvable." Moreover, a growing body of
psychological and sociological research shows that the AGU respondents were
exactly right: there is a direct and compelling relationship between the dominance
of the values that are intimately tied to triumphant capitalism and the presence of
anti-environment views and behaviors. While a great deal of research has
demonstrated that having politically conservative or "hierarchical" views and a
pro-industry slant makes one particularly likely to deny climate change, there is an
even larger number of studies connecting materialistic values (and even free
market ideology) to carelessness not just about climate change, but to a great many
environmental risks. At Knox College in Illinois, psychologist Tim Kasser has
been at the forefront of this work. "To the extent people prioritize values and goals
such as achievement, money, power, status and image, they tend to hold more

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negative attitudes towards the environment, are less likely to engage in positive
environmental behaviors, and are more likely to use natural resources
unsustainably," write Kasser and British environmental strategist Tom Crompton
in their 2009 book, Meeting Environmental Challenges: The Role of Human
Identity. ,~

In other words, the culture that triumphed in our corporate age pits us against
the natural world. This could easily be a cause only for despair. But if there is a
reason for social movements to exist, it is not to accept dominant values as fixed
and unchangeable but to offer other ways to live — to wage, and win, a battle of
cultural worldviews. That means laying out a vision of the world that competes
directly with the one on harrowing display at the Heartland conference and in so
many other parts of our culture, one that resonates with the majority of people on
the planet because it is true: That we are not apart from nature but of it. That acting
collectively for a greater good is not suspect, and that such common projects of
mutual aid are responsible for our species' greatest accomplishments. That greed
must be disciplined and tempered by both rule and example. That poverty amidst
plenty is unconscionable.

It also means defending those parts of our societies that already express these
values outside of capitalism, whether it's an embattled library, a public park, a
student movement demanding free university tuition, or an immigrant rights
movement fighting for dignity and more open borders. And most of all, it means
continually drawing connections among these seemingly disparate struggles —
asserting, for instance, that the logic that would cut pensions, food stamps, and
health care before increasing taxes on the rich is the same logic that would blast
the bedrock of the earth to get the last vapors of gas and the last drops of oil before
making the shift to renewable energy.

Many are attempting to draw these connections and are expressing these
alternative values in myriad ways. And yet a robust movement responding to the
climate crisis is not emerging fast enough. Why? Why aren't we, as a species,
rising to our historical moment? Why are we so far letting "decade zero" slip
away?

It's rational for right-wing ideologues to deny climate change — to recognize it
would be intellectually cataclysmic. But what is stopping so many who reject that
ideology from demanding the kinds of powerful measures that the Heartlanders
fear? Why aren't liberal and left political parties around the world calling for an
end to extreme energy extraction and full transitions to renewal and regeneration-
based economies? Why isn't climate change at the center of the progressive

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agenda, the burning basis for demanding a robust and reinvented commons, rather
than an often forgotten footnote? Why do liberal media outlets still segregate
stories about melting ice sheets in their "green" sections — next to viral videos of
cuddly animals making unlikely friendships? Why are so many of us not doing the
things that must be done to keep warming below catastrophic levels?

The short answer is that the deniers won, at least the first round. Not the battle
over climate science — their influence in that arena is already waning. But the
deniers, and the ideological movement from which they sprang, won the battle
over which values would govern our societies. Their vision — that greed should
guide us, that, to quote the late economist Milton Friedman, "the major error" was
"to believe that it is possible to do good with other people's money" — has
dramatically remade our world over the last four decades, decimating virtually
every countervailing power.~ Extreme free-market ideology was locked in
through the harsh policy conditions attached to much-needed loans issued by the
World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. It shaped the model of export-
led development that dotted the developing world with free trade zones. It was
written into countless trade agreements. Not everyone was convinced by these
arguments, not by a long shot. But too many tacitly accepted Thatcher's dictum
that there is no alternative.

Meanwhile, denigration of collective action and veneration of the profit motive
have infiltrated virtually every government on the planet, every major media
organization, every university, our very souls. As that American Geophysical
Union survey indicated, somewhere inside each of us dwells a belief in their central
lie — that we are nothing but selfish, greedy, self-gratification machines. And if we
are that, then what hope do we have of taking on the grand, often difficult,
collective work that will be required to save ourselves in time? This, without a
doubt, is neoliberalism' s single most damaging legacy: the realization of its bleak
vision has isolated us enough from one another that it became possible to convince
us that we are not just incapable of self-preservation but fundamentally not worth
saving.

Yet at the same time, many of us know the mirror that has been held up to us is
profoundly distorted — that we are, in fact, a mess of contradictions, with our desire
for self-gratification coexisting with deep compassion, our greed with empathy and
solidarity. And as Rebecca Solnit vividly documents in her 2009 book, A Paradise
Built in Hell, it is precisely when humanitariancrises hit that these other, neglected
values leap to the fore, whether it's the incredible displays of international
generosity after a massive earthquake or tsunami, or the way New Yorkers

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gathered to spontaneously meet and comfort one another after the 9/1 1 attacks.
Just as the Heartlanders fear, the existential crisis that is climate change has the
power to release these suppressed values on a global and sustained scale, to provide
us with a chance for a mass jailbreak from the house that their ideology built — a
structure already showing significant cracks and fissures.^

But before that can happen, we need to take a much closer look at precisely how
the legacy of market fundamentalism, and the much deeper cultural narratives on
which it rests, still block critical, life-saving climate action on virtually every front.
The green movement's mantra that climate is not about left and right but "right
and wrong" has gotten us nowhere. The traditional political left does not hold all
the answers to this crisis. But there can be no question that the contemporary
political right, and the triumphant ideology it represents, is a formidable barrier to
progress.

As the next four chapters will show, the real reason we are failing to rise to the
climate moment is because the actions required directly challenge our reigning
economic paradigm (deregulated capitalism combined with public austerity), the
stories on which Western cultures are founded (that we stand apart from nature and
can outsmart its limits), as well as many of the activities that form our identities
and define our communities (shopping, living virtually, shopping some more).
They also spell extinction for the richest and most powerful industry the world has
ever known — the oil and gas industry, which cannot survive in anything like its
current form if we humans are to avoid our own extinction. In short, we have not
responded to this challenge because we are locked in — politically, physically, and
culturally. Only when we identify these chains do we have a chance of breaking
free.

~ Much of this confidence is based on fantasy. Though the ultra-rich may be able to buy a measure of
protection for a while, even the wealthiest nation on the planet can fall apart in the face of a major shock
(as Hurricane Katrina showed). And no society, no matter how well financed or managed, can truly adapt
to massive natural disasters when one comes fast and furious on the heels of the last.

~ In early 201 1, Joe Read, a newly elected representative to the Montana state legislature, made history by
introducing the first bill to officially declare climate change a good thing. "Global warming is beneficial to
the welfare and business climate of Montana," the bill stated. Read explained, "Even if it does get warmer,
we're going to have a longer growing season. It could be very beneficial to the state of Montana. Why are
we going to stop this progress?" The bill did not pass.

1 In a telling development, the American Freedom Alliance hosted its own conference challenging the
reality of climate change in Los Angeles in June 201 1. Part of the Alliance's stated mission is "to identify
threats to Western civilization," and it is known for its fearmongering about "the Islamic penetration of
Europe" and similar supposed designs in the U.S. Meanwhile, one of the books on sale at the Heartland
conference wasGoing Green by Chris Skates, a fictional "thriller" in which climate activists plot with
Islamic terrorists to destroy America's electricity grid.

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HOT MONEY

How Free Market Fundamentalism Helped Overheat the Planet

"We always had hope that next year was gonna be better. And even this
year was gonna be better. We learned slowly, and what didn't work, you
tried it harder the next time. You didn't try something different. You just
tried harder, the same thing that didn't work."

-Wayne Lewis, Dust Bowl survivor, 20 12 1

"As leaders we have a responsibility to fully articulate the risks our
people face. If the politics are not favorable to speaking truthfully, then
clearly we must devote more energy to changing the politics."

-Marlene Moses, Ambassador to the United Nations for Nauru, 2012

During the globalization wars of the late nineties and early 2000s, I used to follow
international trade law extremely closely. But I admit that as I immersed myself in
the science and politics of climate change, I stopped paying attention to trade. I
told myself that there was only so much abstract, bureaucratic jargon one person
could be expected to absorb, and my quota was filled up with emission mitigation
targets, feed-in tariffs, and the United Nations' alphabet soup of UNFCCCs and
IPCCs.

Then about three years ago, I started to notice that green energy programs — the
strong ones that are needed to lower global emissions fast — were increasingly
being challenged under international trade agreements, particularly the World
Trade Organization's rules.

In 2010, for instance, the United States challenged one of China's wind power
subsidy programs on the grounds that it contained supports for local industry

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considered protectionist. China, in turn, filed a complaint in 2012 targeting various
renewable energy programs in the European Union, singling out Italy and Greece
(it has also threatened to bring a dispute against renewables subsidies in five U.S.
states). Washington, meanwhile, has launched a World Trade Organization attack
on India's ambitious Jawaharlal Nehru National Solar Mission, a large, multiphase
solar support program — once again, for containing provisions, designed to
encourage local industry, considered to be protectionist. As a result, brand-new
factories that should be producing solar panels are now contemplating closure. Not
to be outdone, India has signaled that it might take aim at state renewable energy

programs in the U.S."

This is distinctly bizarre behavior to exhibit in the midst of a climate emergency.
Especially because these same governments can be counted upon to angrily
denounce each other at United Nations climate summits for not doing enough to
cut emissions, blaming their own failures on the other's lack of commitment. Yet
rather than compete for the best, most effective supports for green energy, the
biggest emitters in the world are rushing to the WTO to knock down each other' s
windmills.

As one case piled on top of another, it seemed to me that it was time to delve
back into the trade wars. And as I explored the issue further, I discovered that one
of the key, precedent- setting cases pitting "free trade" against climate action was
playing out in Ontario, Canada — my own backyard. Suddenly, trade law became
a whole lot less abstract.

Sitting at the long conference table overlooking his factory floor, Paolo Maccario,
an elegant Italian businessman who moved to Toronto to open a solar factory, has
the proud, resigned air of a captain determined to go down with his ship. He makes
an effort to put on a brave face: True, "the Ontario market is pretty much gone,"
but the company will find new customers for its solar panels, he tells me, maybe
in Europe, or the United States. Their products are good, best in class, and "the
cost is competitive enough.

As chief operating officer of Silfab Ontario, Maccario has to say these things;
anything else would be a breach of fiduciary duty. But he is also frank that the last
few months have been almost absurdly bad. Old customers are convinced the
factory is going to close down and won't be able to honor the twenty-five-year
warranty on the solar panels they purchased. New customers aren't placing orders
over the same concerns, opting to go with Chinese companies that are selling less

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efficient but cheaper modules. Suppliers who had been planning to set up their
own factories nearby to cut down on transport costs are now keeping their distance.

Even his own board back home in Italy (Silfab is owned by Silfab SpA, whose
founder was a pioneer in Italian photovoltaic manufacturing) seemed to be
jumping ship. The parent company had committed to invest around $7 million on
a custom piece of machinery that, according to Maccario, would have created solar
modules that "have an efficiency that has not been reached by any manufacturer in
China and in the Western world." But at the last minute, and after all the research
and design for the machinery was complete, "It was decided that we cannot spend
the money to bring the technology here," Maccario explains. We put on hair nets
and lab coats and he shows me an empty rectangle in the middle of the factory
floor, the space set aside for equipment that is not coming.

What are the chances he would choose to open this factory here today, given all
that has happened, I ask. At this, all attempts at PR drop away and he replies, "I
would say below zero if such a number exists."

With his finely tailored wool suit and trim salt and pepper goatee, Maccario
looks as if he should be sipping espresso in a piazza in Turin, working for Fiat
perhaps — not stuck in this concrete box with an unopened yogurt on his desk,
across the street from Imperial Chilled Juice and down the road from the ass end
of an AMC multiplex.

And yet in 2010, the decision to locate the company's first North American solar
manufacturing plant in Ontario seemed to make a great deal of sense. Back then
the mood in Ontario's renewable sector was positively giddy. One year earlier, at
the peak of the Wall Street financial crisis, the province had unveiled its climate
action plan, the Green Energy and Green Economy Act, centered on a bold pledge
to wean Canada's most populous province completely off coal by 2014.~

The plan was lauded by energy experts around the world, particularly in the U.S.,
where such ambition was lagging. On a visit to Toronto, Al Gore offered his
highest blessing, proclaiming it "widely recognized now as the single best green
energy [program] on the North American continent." And Michael T. Eckhart, then
president of the American Council on Renewable Energy, described it as "the most
comprehensive renewable energy policy entered anywhere around the world."

The legislation created what is known as a feed-in tariff program, which allowed
renewable energy providers to sell power back to the grid, offering long-term
contracts with guaranteed premium prices. It also contained a variety of provisions
to ensure that the developers weren't all big players but that local municipalities,
co-ops, and Indigenous communities could all get into the renewable energy

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market and benefit from those premium rates. The catch was that in order for most
of the energy providers to qualify, they had to ensure that a minimum percentage
of their workforces and materials were local to Ontario. And the province set the
bar high: solar energy developers had to source at least 40-60 percent of their

content from within the province.

The provision was an attempt to revive Ontario's moribund manufacturing
sector, which had long been centered on the Big Three U.S. automakers (Chrysler,
Ford, and General Motors) and was, at that time, reeling from the near bankruptcy
of General Motors and Chrysler. Compounding these challenges was the fact that
Alberta's tar sands oil boom had sent the Canadian dollar soaring, making Ontario
a much costlier place to build anything.

In the years that followed the announcement, Ontario's efforts to get off coal
were plagued by political blunders. Large natural gas and wind developers ran
roughshod over local communities, while the government wasted hundreds of
millions (at least) trying to clean up the unnecessary messes. Yet even with all
these screwups, the core of the program was an undeniable success. By 2012,
Ontario was the largest solar producer in Canada and by 2013, it had only one
working coal-fired power plant left. The local content requirements — as the "buy
local" and "hire local" provisions are called — were also proving to be a significant
boost to the ailing manufacturing sector: by 2014, more than 31,000 jobs had been

created and a wave of solar and wind manufacturers had set up shop.

Silfab is a great example of how it worked. The Italian owners had already
decided to open a solar panel plant in North America. The company had considered
Mexico but was leaning toward the United States. The obvious choices, Maccario
told me, were California, Hawaii, and Texas, all of which offered lots of sunshine
and corporate incentives, as well as large and growing markets for their product.
Ontario — overcast and cold a lot of the year — wasn't "on the radar screen," he
admitted. That changed when the province introduced the green energy plan with
its local-content provisions, which Maccario described as a "very gutsy and very
well intended program." The provisions meant that in communities that switched
to renewable energy, companies like his could count on a stable market for their
products, one that was protected from having to compete head-to-head with
cheaper solar panels from China. So Silfab chose Toronto for its first North
American solar plant.

Ontario's politicians loved Silfab. It helped that the building the company
purchased to produce its panels was an abandoned auto parts factory, then sitting
idle like so many others. And many of the workers the company hired also came

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from the auto sector — men and women from Chrysler and the autoparts giant
Magna, who had years of experience working with the kind of robotic arms that
are used to assemble Silfab's high-tech panels. When the plant opened, Wayne
Wright, a laid-off auto worker who landed a job as a production operator on the
Silfab line, spoke movingly about his seventeen-year-old son, who told him that
"finally" his dad's new job would be "creating a better future for all the younger
kids."^

And then things started to go very wrong. Just as the U.S. has acted against local
renewable supports in China and India, so Japan and then the European Union let
it be known that they considered Ontario's local-content requirement to be a
violation of World Trade Organization rules. Specifically, they claimed that the
requirement that a fixed percentage of renewable energy equipment be made in
Ontario would "discriminate against equipment for renewable energy generation
facilities produced outside Ontario. "~

The WTO ruled against Canada, determining that Ontario's buy-local provisions
were indeed illegal. And the province wasted little time in nixing the local-content

rules that had been so central to its program. It was this, Maccario said, that led
his foreign investors to pull their support for factory expansion. "Seeing all those,
for lack of a better term, mixed messages . . . was the straw that broke the camel's
back."

It was also why many plants like his could well close, and others have decided
not to open in the first place.

Trade Trumps Climate

From a climate perspective, the WTO ruling was an outrage: if there is to be any
hope of meeting the agreed-upon 2 degree Celsius target, wealthy economies like
Canada must make getting off fossil fuels their top priority. It is a moral duty, one
that the federal government undertook when it signed the Kyoto Protocol in 1997.
Ontario was putting real policies in place to honor that commitment (unlike the
Canadian government as a whole, which has allowed emissions to balloon, leading
it to withdraw from the Kyoto Protocol rather than face international censure).
Most importantly, the program was working. How absurd, then, for the WTO to
interfere with that success — to let trade trump the planet itself.

And yet from a strictly legal standpoint, Japan and the EU were perfectly correct.
One of the key provisions in almost all free trade agreements involves something

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called "national treatment," which requires governments to make no distinction
between goods produced by local companies and goods produced by foreign firms
outside their borders. Indeed, favoring local industry constitutes illegal
"discrimination." This was a flashpoint in the free trade wars back in the 1990s,
precisely because these restrictions effectively prevent governments from doing
what Ontario was trying to do: create jobs by requiring the sourcing of local goods
as a condition of government support. This was just one of the many fateful battles
that progressives lost in those years.

Defenders of these trade deals argue that protections like Ontario's buy-local
provisions distort the free market and should be eliminated. Some green energy
entrepreneurs (usually those that purchase their products from China) have made
similar arguments, insisting that it doesn't matter where solar panel and wind
turbines are produced: the goal should be to get the cheapest products to the
consumer so that the green transition can happen as quickly as possible.

The biggest problem with these arguments is the notion that there is any free
market in energy to be protected from distortion. Not only do fossil fuel companies
receive $775 billion to $1 trillion in annual global subsidies, but they pay nothing
for the privilege of treating our shared atmosphere as a free waste dump — a fact
that has been described by the Stem Review on the Economics of Climate
Change as "the greatest market failure the world has ever seen." That freebie is the

real distortion, that theft of the sky the real subsidy.^

In order to cope with these distortions (which the WTO has made no attempt to
correct), governments need to take a range of aggressive steps — from price
guarantees to straight subsidies — so that green energy has a fair shot at competing.
We know from experience that this works: Denmark has among the most
successful renewable energy programs in the world, with 40 percent of its
electricity coming from renewables, mostly wind. But it's significant that the
program was rolled out in the 1980s, before the free trade era began, when there
was no one to argue with the Danish government's generous subsidies to the
community-controlled energy projects putting up wind turbines (in 1980, new

installations were subsidized by up to 30 percent).

As Scott Sinclair of the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives has pointed out,
"many of the policies Denmark used to launch its renewable energy industry would
have been inconsistent with ... international trade and investment agreements,"
since favoring "locally owned cooperatives would conflict with non-
discrimination rules requiring that foreign companies be treated no less favourably
than domestic suppliers."

THIS CHANGES EVERYTHING | 61

And Aaron Cosbey, a development economist and trade and climate expert who
is generally supportive of the WTO, rightly notes that the promise of local job
creation has been key to the political success of renewable energy programs. "In
many cases the green jobs argument is the deciding factor that convinces
governments to dole out support. And such requirements, if attached to subsidies
or investment privileges, violate WTO obligations." 1 ^

Which is why governments adopting these tried-and-tested policies — of which
there have been far too few — are the ones getting dragged into trade court, whether
China, India, Ontario, or the European Union.

Worse, it's not only critical supports for renewable energy that are at risk of
these attacks. Any attempt by a government to regulate the sale or extraction of
particularly dirty kinds of fossil fuels is also vulnerable to similar trade challenges.
The European Union, for instance, is considering new fuel quality standards that
would effectively restrict the sales of oil derived from such high-carbon sources as
the Alberta tar sands. It's excellent climate policy, of the kind we need much more,
but the effort has been slowed down by Canada's not so subtle threats of trade
retaliation. Meanwhile, the European Union is using bilateral trade talks to try to
circumvent longstanding U.S. restrictions on oil and gas exports, including a
decades-old export ban on crude oil. In July 2014, a leaked negotiating document
revealed that Europe is pushing for a "legally binding commitment" that would
guarantee its ability to import fracked gas and oil from North Dakota's Bakken

formation and elsewhere.

Almost a decade ago, a WTO official claimed that the organization enables
challenges against "almost any measure to reduce greenhouse gas emissions" —
there was little public reaction at the time, but clearly there should have been. And
the WTO is far from the only trade weapon that can be used in such battles — so

1 8

too can countless bilateral and regional free trade and investment agreements.

As we will see later on, these trade deals may even give multinationals the power
to overturn landmark grassroots victories against highly controversial extractive
activities like natural gas fracking: in 2012, an oil company began taking steps to
use NAFTA to challenge Quebec's hard-won fracking moratorium, claiming it

robbed the company of its right to drill for gas in the province. (The case is
ongoing.) As more activist victories are won, more such legal challenges should
be expected.

In some of these cases, governments may successfully defend their emission-
reducing activities in trade court. But in too many others, they can be relied upon
to cave in early, not wanting to appear anti-free trade (which is likely what is

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behind Ontario's quiet acceptance of the WTO's ruling against its green energy
plan). These challenges aren't killing renewable energy; in the U.S. and China, for
instance, the solar market continues to grow impressively. But it is not happening
fast enough. And the legal uncertainty that now surrounds some of the most
significant green energy programs in the world is bogging us down at the very
moment when science is telling us we need to leap ahead. To allow arcane trade
law, which has been negotiated with scant public scrutiny, to have this kind of
power over an issue so critical to humanity's future is a special kind of madness.
As Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz puts it, "Should you let a group
of foolish lawyers, who put together something before they understood these

issues, interfere with saving the planet?"

Clearly not. Steven Shrybman, an international trade and public interest lawyer
who has worked with a broad range of civil society groups to defend against these
trade challenges, says that the problem is structural. "If the trade rules don't permit
all kinds of important measures to deal with climate change — and they don't —
then the trade rules obviously have to be rewritten. Because there is no way in the
world that we can have a sustainable economy and maintain international trade

rules as they are. There's no way at all."

This is exactly the sort of commonsense conclusion that has the Heartlanders so
very scared of climate change. Because when people wake up to the fact that our
governments have locked us into dozens of agreements that make important parts
of a robust climate change response illegal, they will have an awfully powerful
argument to oppose any such new deals until the small matter of our planet's
habitability is satisfactorily resolved.

The same goes for all kinds of free market orthodoxies that threaten our capacity
to respond boldly to this crisis, from the suffocating logic of austerity that prevents
governments from making the necessary investments in low-carbon infrastructure
(not to mention firefighting and flood response), to the auctioning off of electric
utilities to private corporations that, in many cases, refuse to switch over to less
profitable renewables.

Indeed the three policy pillars of the neoliberal age — privatization of the public
sphere, deregulation of the corporate sector, and the lowering of income and
corporate taxes, paid for with cuts to public spending — are each incompatible with
many of the actions we must take to bring our emissions to safe levels. And
together these pillars form an ideological wall that has blocked a serious response
to climate change for decades. Before delving more deeply into the ways the

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climate crisis calls for dismantling that wall, it' s helpful to look a little more closely
at the epic case of bad timing that landed us where we are today.

A Wall Comes Down, Emissions Go Up

If the climate movement had a birthday, a moment when the issue pierced the
public consciousness and could no longer be ignored, it would have to be June 23,
1988. Global warming had been on the political and scientific radar long before
that, however. The basic insights central to our current understanding date back to
the beginning of the second half of the nineteenth century, and the first scientific
breakthroughs demonstrating that burning carbon could be warming the planet
were made in the late 1950s. In 1965, the concept was so widely accepted among
specialists that U.S. president Lyndon B. Johnson was given a report from his
Science Advisory Committee warning that, "Through his worldwide industrial
civilization, Man is unwittingly conducting a vast geophysical experiment. . . . The
climatic changes that may be produced by the increased CChcontent could be

deleterious from the point of view of human beings."

But it wasn't until James Hansen, then director of NASA's Goddard Institute for
Space Studies, testified before a packed congressional hearing on June 23, 1988,
that global warming became the stuff of chat shows and political speeches. With
temperatures in Washington, D.C., a sweltering 98 degrees Fahrenheit (still a
record for that day), and the building's air conditioning on the fritz, Hansen told a
room filled with sweaty lawmakers that he had "99 percent confidence" in "a real
warming trend" linked to human activity. In a comment to The New York Times he
added that it was "time to stop waffling" about the science. Later that same month,
hundreds of scientists and policymakers held the historic World Conference on the
Changing Atmosphere in Toronto where the first emission reductions were
discussed. The United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
(IPCC), the premier scientific body advising governments on the climate threat,
held its first session that November. By the following year, 79 percent of
Americans had heard of the greenhouse effect — a leap from just 38 percent in
1981 —

The issue was so prominent that when the editors of 77raemagazine announced
their 1988 "Man of the Year," they went for an unconventional choice: "Planet of
the Year: Endangered Earth," read the magazine's cover line, over an image of the
globe held together with twine, the sun setting ominously in the background. "No

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single individual, no event, no movement captured imaginations or dominated
headlines more," journalist Thomas Sancton explained, "than the clump of rock

and soil and water and air that is our common home."

More striking than the image was Sancton's accompanying essay. "This year the
earth spoke, like God warning Noah of the deluge. Its message was loud and clear,
and suddenly people began to listen, to ponder what portents the message held."
That message was so profound, so fundamental, he argued, that it called into
question the founding myths of modern Western culture. Here it is worth quoting
Sancton at length as he described the roots of the crisis:

In many pagan societies, the earth was seen as a mother, a fertile giver of life.
Nature — the soil, forest, sea — was endowed with divinity, and mortals were
subordinate to it. The Judeo-Christian tradition introduced a radically
different concept. The earth was the creation of a monotheistic God, who,
after shaping it, ordered its inhabitants, in the words of Genesis: "Be fruitful
and multiply, and replenish the earth and subdue it: and have dominion over
the fish of the sea and over the fowl of the air and over every living thing that
moveth upon the earth." The idea of dominion could be interpreted as an

invitation to use nature as a convenience.

The diagnosis wasn't original — indeed it was a synthesis of the founding
principles of ecological thought. But to read these words in America's most
studiously centrist magazine was nothing short of remarkable. For this reason and
others, the start of 1989 felt to many in the environmental movement like a
momentous juncture, as if the thawing of the Cold War and the warming of the
planet were together helping to birth a new consciousness, one in which
cooperation would triumph over domination, and humility before nature's
complexity would challenge technological hubris.

As governments came together to debate responses to climate change, strong
voices from developing countries spoke up, insisting that the core of the problem
was the high-consumption lifestyle that dominated in the West. In a speech in
1989, for instance, India's President R. Venkataraman argued that the global
environmental crisis was the result of developed countries' "excessive
consumption of all materials and through large-scale industrialization intended to

support their styles of life." If wealthy countries consumed less, then everyone
would be safer.

But if that was the way 1989 began, it would end very differently. In the months
that followed, popular uprisings would spread across the Soviet-controlled Eastern
Bloc, from Poland to Hungary and finally to East Germany where, in November

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1989, the Berlin Wall collapsed. Under the banner "the End of History," right-
wing ideologues in Washington seized on this moment of global flux to crush all
political competition, whether socialism, Keynesianism, or deep ecology. They
waged a frontal attack on political experimentation, on the idea that there might be
viable ways of organizing societies other than deregulated capitalism.

Within a decade, all that would be left standing would be their own extreme,
pro-corporate ideology. Not only would the Western consumer lifestyle survive
intact, it would grow significantly more lavish, with U.S. credit card debt per

household increasing fourfold between 1980 and 2010. Simultaneously, that
voracious lifestyle would be exported to the middle and upper classes in every
corner of the globe — including, despite earlier protestations, India, where it would
wreak environmental damage on a scale difficult to fathom. The victories in the
new era would be faster and bigger than almost anyone predicted; and the armies
of losers would be left to pick through the ever-growing mountains of methane-
spewing waste.

Trade and Climate: Two Solitudes

Throughout this period of rapid change, the climate and trade negotiations closely
paralleled one another, each winning landmark agreements within a couple of
years of each other. In 1992, governments met for the first United Nations Earth
Summit in Rio, where they signed the United Nations Framework Convention on
Climate Change (UNFCCC), the document that formed the basis for all future
climate negotiations. That same year, the North American Free Trade Agreement
was signed, going into effect two years later. Also in 1994, negotiations
establishing the World Trade Organization concluded, and the new global trade
body made its debut the next year. In 1997, the Kyoto Protocol was adopted,
containing the first binding emission reduction targets. In 2001, China gained full
membership in the WTO, the culmination of a trade and investment liberalization
process that had begun decades earlier.

What is most remarkable about these parallel processes — trade on the one hand,
climate on the other — is the extent to which they functioned as two solitudes.
Indeed, each seemed to actively pretend that the other did not exist, ignoring the
most glaring questions about how one would impact the other. Like, for example:
How would the vastly increased distances that basic goods would now travel — by
carbon- spewing container ships and jumbo jets, as well as diesel trucks — impact

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the carbon emissions that the climate negotiations were aiming to reduce? How
would the aggressive protections for technology patents enshrined under the WTO
impact the demands being made by developing nations in the climate negotiations
for free transfers of green technologies to help them develop on a low-carbon path?
And perhaps most critically, how would provisions that allowed private companies
to sue national governments over laws that impinged on their profits dissuade
governments from adopting tough antipollution regulations, for fear of getting
sued?

These questions were not debated by government negotiators, nor was any
attempt made to resolve their obvious contradictions. Not that there was ever any
question about which side would win should any of the competing pledges to cut
emissions and knock down commercial barriers ever come into direct conflict: the
commitments made in the climate negotiations all effectively functioned on the
honor system, with a weak and unthreatening mechanism to penalize countries that
failed to keep their promises. The commitments made under trade agreements,
however, were enforced by a dispute settlement system with real teeth, and
failure to comply would land governments in trade court, often facing harsh
penalties.

In fact, the hierarchy was so clear that the climate negotiators formally declared
their subservience to the trading system from the start. When the U.N. climate
agreement was signed at the Rio Earth Summit in 1992, it made clear that
"measures taken to combat climate change, including unilateral ones, should not
constitute ... a disguised restriction on international trade." (Similar language
appears in the Kyoto Protocol.) As Australian political scientist Robyn Eckersley
puts it, this was "the pivotal moment that set the shape of the relationship between
the climate and trade regimes" because, "Rather than push for the recalibration of
the international trade rules to conform with the requirements of climate
protection . . . the Parties to the climate regime have ensured that liberalized trade
and an expanding global economy have been protected against trade-restrictive
climate policies." This practically guaranteed that the negotiating process would
be unable to reckon with the kinds of bold but "trade -restrictive" policy options
that could have been coordinated internationally — from buy-local renewable
energy programs to restrictions on trade in goods produced with particularly high
carbon footprints.^

A few isolated voices were well aware that the modest gains being made in the
negotiations over "sustainable development" were being actively unmade by the
new trade and investment architecture. One of those voices belonged to Martin

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Khor, then director of the Third World Network, which has been a key advisor to
developing country governments in both trade and climate talks. At the end of the
1992 Rio Earth Summit, Khor cautioned that there was a "general feeling among
Southern country delegates ... that events outside the [summit] process were
threatening to weaken the South further and to endanger whatever positive
elements exist in" the Rio agenda. The examples he cited were the austerity
policies being pushed at the time by the World Bank and the International
Monetary Fund, as well as the trade negotiations that would soon result in the

creation of the WTO.

Another early warning was sounded by Steven Shrybman, who observed a
decade and a half ago that the global export of industrial agriculture had already
dealt a devastating blow to any possible progress on emissions. In a paper
published in 2000, Shrybman argued that "the globalization of agricultural systems
over recent decades is likely to have been one of the most important causes of

overall increases in greenhouse gas emissions."

This had far less to do with current debates about the "food miles" associated
with imported versus local produce than with the way in which the trade system,
by granting companies like Monsanto and Cargill their regulatory wish list — from
unfettered market access to aggressive patent protection to the maintenance of their
rich subsidies — has helped to entrench and expand the energy-intensive, higher-
emissions model of industrial agriculture around the world. This, in turn, is a major
explanation for why the global food system now accounts for between 19 and 29
percent of world greenhouse gas emissions. "Trade policy and rules actually drive
climate change in a very structural way in respect of food systems," Shrybman
stressed in an interview.^

The habit of willfully erasing the climate crisis from trade agreements continues
to this day: for instance, in early 2014, several negotiating documents for the
proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership, a controversial new NAFTA-style trade deal
spanning twelve countries, were released to the public via WikiLeaks and the
Peruvian human rights group RedGE. A draft of the environment chapter had
contained language stating that countries "acknowledge climate change as a global
concern that requires collective action and recognize the importance of
implementation of their respective commitments under the United Nations
Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC)." The language was vague
and nonbinding, but at least it was a tool that governments could use to defend
themselves should their climate policies be challenged in a trade tribunal, as
Ontario's plan was. But a later document showed that U.S. negotiators had

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proposed an edit: take out all the stuff about climate change and UNFCCC
commitments. In other words, while trade has repeatedly been allowed to trump

climate, under no circumstances would climate be permitted to trump traded

Nor was it only the trade negotiators who blocked out the climate crisis as they
negotiated agreements that would send emissions soaring and make many
solutions to this problem illegal. The climate negotiations exhibited their own
special form of denial. In the early and mid-1990s, while the first climate protocol
was being drafted, these negotiators, along with the Intergovernmental Panel on
Climate Change, hashed out the details of precisely how countries should measure
and monitor how much carbon they were emitting — a necessary process since
governments were on the verge of pledging their first round of emission
reductions, which would need to be reported and monitored.

The emissions accounting system on which they settled was an odd relic of the
pre-free trade era that took absolutely no account of the revolutionary changes
unfolding right under their noses regarding how (and where) the world's goods
were being manufactured. For instance, emissions from the transportation of goods
across borders — all those container ships, whose traffic has increased by nearly
400 percent over the last twenty years — are not formally attributed to any nation-
state and therefore no one country is responsible for reducing their polluting
impact. (And there remains little momentum at the U.N. for changing that, despite

the reality that shipping emissions are set to double or even triple by 2050.)""

And fatefully, countries are responsible only for the pollution they create inside
their own borders — not for the pollution produced in the manufacturing of goods
that are shipped to their shores; those are attributed to the countries where the

goods were produced.^ This means that the emissions that went into producing,
say, the television in my living room, appear nowhere on Canada's emissions
ledger, but rather are attributed entirely to China's ledger, because that is where
the set was made. And the international emissions from the container ship that
carried my TV across the ocean (and then sailed back again) aren't entered into
anyone's account book.

This deeply flawed system has created a vastly distorted picture of the drivers
of global emissions. It has allowed rapidly de-industrializing wealthy states to
claim that their emissions have stabilized or even gone down when, in fact, the
emissions embedded in their consumption have soared during the free trade era.
For instance, in 2011, the Proceedings of the National Academy of
Sciences published a study of the emissions from industrialized countries that
signed the Kyoto Protocol. It found that while their emissions had stopped

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growing, that was partly because international trade had allowed these countries to
move their dirty production overseas. The researchers concluded that the rise in
emissions from goods produced in developingcountries but consumed in
industrialized ones was six timesgreater than the emissions savings of

industrialized countries.

Cheap Labor, Dirty Energy: A Package Deal

As the free trade system was put in place and producing offshore became the rule,
emissions did more than move — they multiplied. As mentioned earlier, before the
neoliberal era, emissions growth had been slowing, from 4.5 percent annual
increases in the 1960s to about 1 percent a year in the 1990s. But the new
millennium was a watershed: between 2000 and 2008, the growth rate reached 3.4
percent a year, shooting past the highest IPCC projections of the day. In 2009, it
dipped due to the financial crisis, but made up for lost time with the historic 5.9
percent increase in 2010 that left climate watchers reeling. (In mid-2014, two
decades after the creation of the WTO, the IPCC finally acknowledged the reality
of globalization and noted in its Fifth Assessment Report, "A growing share of
total anthropogenic CO2 emissions is released in the manufacture of products that
are traded across international borders. ")~

The reason for what Andreas Malm — a Swedish expert on the history of coal —
describes as "the early 21st Century emissions explosion" is straightforward
enough. When China became the "workshop of the world" it also became the coal-
spewing "chimney of the world." By 2007, China was responsible for two thirds
of the annual increase in global emissions. Some of that was the result of China's
own internal development — bringing electricity to rural areas, and building roads.
But a lot of it was directly tied to foreign trade: according to one study, between
2002 and 2008, 48 percent of China's total emissions was related to producing
goods for export. 22

"One of the reasons why we're in the climate crisis is because of this model of
globalization," says Margrete Strand Rangnes, executive vice president at Public
Citizen, a Washington-based policy institute that has been at the forefront of the
fight against free trade. And that, she says, is a problem that requires "a pretty

fundamental re-formation of our economy, if we're going to do this right."

International trade deals were only one of the reasons that
governments embraced this particular model of fast-and-dirty, export-led

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development, and every country had its own peculiarities. In many cases (though
not China's), the conditions attached to loans from the International Monetary
Fund and World Bank were a major factor, so was the economic orthodoxy
imparted to elite students at schools like Harvard and the University of Chicago.
All of these and other factors played a role in shaping what was (never ironically)
referred to as the Washington Consensus. Underneath it all is the constant drive
for endless economic growth, a drive that, as will be explored later on, goes much
deeper than the trade history of the past few decades. But there is no question that
the trade architecture and the economic ideology embedded within it played a
central role in sending emissions into hyperdrive.

That's because one of the primary driving forces of the particular trade system
designed in the 1980s and 1990s was always to allow multinationals the freedom
to scour the globe in search of the cheapest and most exploitable labor force. It was
a journey that passed through Mexico and Central America's sweatshop
maquiladoras and had a long stopover in South Korea. But by the end of the 1990s,
virtually all roads led to China, a country where wages were extraordinarily low,
trade unions were brutally suppressed, and the state was willing to spend
seemingly limitless funds on massive infrastructure projects — modern ports,
sprawling highway systems, endless numbers of coal-fired power plants, massive
dams — all to ensure that the lights stayed on in the factories and the goods made it
from the assembly lines onto the container ships on time. A free trader's dream, in
other words — and a climate nightmare.

A nightmare because there is a close correlation between low wages and high
emissions, or as Malm puts it, "a causal link between the quest for cheap and
disciplined labor power and rising CO2 emissions." And why wouldn't there be?
The same logic that is willing to work laborers to the bone for pennies a day will
burn mountains of dirty coal while spending next to nothing on pollution controls
because it's the cheapest way to produce. So when the factories moved to China,
they also got markedly dirtier. As Malm points out, Chinese coal use was declining
slightly between 1995 and 2000, only for the explosion in manufacturing to send
it soaring once again. It's not that the companies moving their production to
China wanted to drive up emissions: they were after the cheap labor, but exploited
workers and an exploited planet are, it turns out, a package deal. A destabilized

climate is the cost of deregulated, global capitalism, its unintended, yet

unavoidable consequence.

This connection between pollution and labor exploitation has been true since the
earliest days of the Industrial Revolution. But in the past, when workers organized

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to demand better wages, and when city dwellers organized to demand cleaner air,
the companies were pretty much forced to improve both working and
environmental standards. That changed with the advent of free trade: thanks to the
removal of virtually all barriers to capital flows, corporations could pick up and
leave every time labor costs started rising. That's why many large manufacturers
left South Korea for China in the late 1990s, and it's why many are now leaving
China, where wages are climbing, for Bangladesh, where they are significantly
lower. So while our clothes, electronics, and furniture may be made in China, the
economic model was primarily made in the U.S.A.

And yet when the subject of climate change comes up in discussion in wealthy,
industrialized countries, the instant response, very often, is that it's all China's
fault (and India's fault and Brazil's fault and so on). Why bother cutting our own
emissions when everyone knows that the fast developing economies are the real

problem, opening more coal plants every month than we could ever close? This
argument is made as if we in the West are mere spectators to this reckless and dirty
model of economic growth. As if it was not our governments and our
multinationals that pushed a model of export-led development that made all of this
possible. It is said as if it were not our own corporations who, with single-minded
determination (and with full participation from China's autocratic rulers), turned
the Pearl River Delta into their carbon- spewing special economic zone, with the
goods going straight onto container ships headed to our superstores. All in the
name of feeding the god of economic growth (via the altar of hyper-consumption)
in every country in the world.

The victims in all this are regular people: the workers who lose their factory jobs
in Juarez and Windsor; the workers who get the factory jobs in Shenzhen and
Dhaka, jobs that are by this point so degraded that some employers install nets
along the perimeters of roofs to catch employees when they jump, or where safety
codes are so lax that workers are killed in the hundreds when buildings collapse.
The victims are also the toddlers mouthing lead-laden toys; the Walmart employee
expected to work over the Thanksgiving holiday only to be trampled by a stampede
of frenzied customers, while still not earning a living wage. And the Chinese
villagers whose water is contaminated by one of those coal plants we use as our
excuse for inaction, as well as the middle class of Beijing and Shanghai whose kids

are forced to play inside because the air is so foul.

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A Movement Digs Its Own Grave

The greatest tragedy of all is that so much of this was eminently avoidable. We
knew about the climate crisis when the rules of the new trade system were being
written. After all, NAFTA was signed just one year after governments, including
the United States, signed the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate
Change in Rio. And it was by no means inevitable that these deals would go
through. A strong coalition of North American labor and environmental groups
opposed NAFTA precisely because they knew it would drive down labor and
environmental standards. For a time it even looked as if they would win.

Public opinion in all three countries was deeply divided, so much so that when
Bill Clinton ran for president in 1992, he pledged that he would not sign NAFTA
until it substantively reflected those concerns. In Canada, Jean Chretien
campaigned for prime minister against the deal in the election of 1993. Once both
were in office, however, the deal was left intact and two toothless side agreements
were tacked on, one for labor and one for environmental standards. The labor
movement knew better than to fall for this ploy and continued to forcefully oppose
the deal, as did many Democrats in the U.S. But for a complex set of reasons that
will be explored later, having to do with a combination of reflexive political
centrism and the growing influence of corporate "partners" and donors, the
leadership of many large environmental organizations decided to play ball. "One
by one, former NAFTA opponents and skeptics became enthusiastic supporters,
and said so publicly," writes journalist Mark Dowie in his critical history of the
U.S. environmental movement, Losing Ground. These Big Green groups even
created their own pro-NAFTA organization, the Environmental Coalition for
NAFTA — which included the National Wildlife Federation, the Environmental
Defense Fund, Conservation International, the National Audubon Society, the
Natural Resources Defense Council, and the World Wildlife Fund — which,
according to Dowie provided its "unequivocal support to the agreement." Jay Hair,
then head of the National Wildlife Federation, even flew to Mexico on an official
U.S. trade mission to lobby his Mexican counterparts, while attacking his critics

for "putting their protectionist polemics ahead of concern for the environment."

Not everyone in the green movement hopped on the pro-trade bandwagon:
Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth, and the Sierra Club, as well as many small
organizations, continued to oppose NAFTA. But that didn't matter to the Clinton
administration, which had what it wanted — the ability to tell a skeptical public that
"groups representing 80 percent of national [environmental] group membership
have endorsed NAFTA." And that was important, because Clinton faced an uphill

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battle getting NAFTA through Congress, with many in his own party pledging to
vote against the deal. John Adams, then director of the Natural Resources Defense
Council, succinctly described the extraordinarily helpful role played by groups like
his: "We broke the back of the environmental opposition to NAFTA. After we

established our position Clinton only had labor to fight. We did him a big favor."

Indeed when the president signed NAFTA into law in 1993, he made a special
point of thanking "the environmental people who came out and worked through
this — many of them at great criticism, particularly in the environmental
movement." Clinton also made it clear that this victory was about more than one
agreement. "Today we have the chance to do what our parents did before us. We
have the opportunity to remake the world." He explained that, "We are on the verge
of a global economic expansion.... Already the confidence we've displayed by
ratifying NAFTA has begun to bear fruit. We are now making real progress toward
a worldwide trade agreement so significant that it could make the material gains
of NAFTA for our country look small by comparison." He was referring to the
World Trade Organization. And just in case anyone was still worried about the
environmental consequences, Clinton offered his personal assurance. "We will
seek new institutional arrangements to ensure that trade leaves the world cleaner

than before."

Standing by the president's side was his vice president, Al Gore, who had been
largely responsible for getting so many Big Green groups on board. Given this
history, it should hardly come as a surprise that the mainstream environmental
movement has been in no rush to draw attention to the disastrous climate impacts
of the free trade era. To do so would only highlight their own active role in helping
the U.S. government to, in Clinton's words, "remake the world." Much better, as
we will see later on, to talk about light bulbs and fuel efficiency.

The significance of the NAFTA signing was indeed historic, tragically so.
Because if the environmental movement had not been so agreeable, NAFTA might
have been blocked or renegotiated to set a different kind of precedent. A new trade
architecture could have been built that did not actively sabotage the fragile global
climate change consensus. Instead — as had been the promise and hope of the 1992
Rio Earth Summit — this new architecture could have been grounded in the need to
fight poverty and reduce emissions at the same time. So for example, trade access
to developing countries could have been tied to transfers of resources and green
technology so that critical new electricity and transit infrastructure was low carbon
from the outset. And the deals could have been written to ensure that any measures
taken to support renewable energy would not be penalized and, in fact, could be

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rewarded. The global economy might not have grown as quickly as it did, but it
also would not be headed rapidly off the climate cliff.

The errors of this period cannot be undone, but it is not too late for a new kind
of climate movement to take up the fight against so-called free trade and build this
needed architecture now. That doesn't — and never did — mean an end to economic
exchange across borders. It does, however, mean a far more thoughtful and
deliberate approach to why we trade and whom it serves. Encouraging the frenetic
and indiscriminate consumption of essentially disposable products can no longer
be the system's goal. Goods must once again be made to last, and the use of energy-
intensive long-haul transport will need to be rationed — reserved for those cases
where goods cannot be produced locally or where local production is more carbon-
intensive. (For example, growing food in greenhouses in cold parts of the United
States is often more energy intensive than growing it in warmer regions and

shipping it by light rail.)

According to liana Solomon, trade analyst for the Sierra Club, this is not a fight
that the climate movement can avoid. "In order to combat climate change, there's
a real need to start localizing our economies again, and thinking about how and
what we're purchasing and how it' s produced. And the most basic rule of trade law
is you can't privilege domestic over foreign. So how do you tackle the idea of
needing to incentivize local economies, tying together local green jobs policies
with clean energy policies, when that is just a no-go in trade policy? ... If we don't
think about how the economy is structured, then we're actually never going to the

real root of the problem."

These kinds of economic reforms would be good news — for unemployed
workers, for farmers unable to compete with cheap imports, for communities that
have seen their manufacturers move offshore and their local businesses replaced
with big box stores. And all of these constituencies would be needed to fight for
these policies, since they represent the reversal of the thirty-year trend of removing
every possible limit on corporate power.

From Frenetic Expansion to Steady States

Challenging free trade orthodoxy is a heavy lift in our political culture; anything
that has been in place for that long takes on an air of inevitability. But, critical as
these shifts are, they are not enough to lower emissions in time. To do that, we will
need to confront a logic even more entrenched than free trade — the logic of

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indiscriminate economic growth. This idea has understandably inspired a good
deal of resistance among more liberal climate watchers, who insist that the task is
merely to paint our current growth-based economic model green, so it's worth
examining the numbers behind the claim.

It is Kevin Anderson of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, and
one of Britain's top climate experts, who has most forcefully built the case that our
growth-based economic logic is now in fundamental conflict with atmospheric
limits. Addressing everyone from the U.K. Department for International
Development to the Manchester City Council, Anderson has spent more than a
decade patiently translating the implications of the latest climate science to
politicians, economists, and campaigners. In clear and understandable language,
the spiky-haired former mechanical engineer (who used to work in the
petrochemical sector) lays out a rigorous road map for cutting our emissions down
to a level that provides a decent shot at keeping global temperature rise below 2
degrees Celsius.

But in recent years Anderson's papers and slide shows have become more
alarming. Under titles such as "Climate Change: Going Beyond
Dangerous . . . Brutal Numbers and Tenuous Hope," he points out that the chances
of staying within anything like safe temperature levels are diminishing fast. With
his colleague Alice Bows-Larkin, an atmospheric physicist and climate change
mitigation expert at the Tyndall Centre, Anderson argues that we have lost so much
time to political stalling and weak climate policies — all while emissions
ballooned — that we are now facing cuts so drastic that they challenge the core

expansionist logic at the heart of our economic system.

They argue that, if the governments of developed countries want a fifty-fifty
chance of hitting the agreed-upon international target of keeping warming below
2 degrees Celsius, and if reductions are to respect any kind of equity principle
between rich and poor nations, then wealthy countries need to start cutting their
greenhouse gas emissions by something like 8 to 10 percent a year — and they need
to start right now. The idea that such deep cuts are required used to be controversial
in the mainstream climate community, where the deadlines for steep reductions
always seemed to be far off in the future (an 80 percent cut by 2050, for instance).
But as emissions have soared and as tipping points loom, that is changing rapidly.
Even Yvo de Boer, who held the U.N.'s top climate position until 2009, remarked
recently that "the only way" negotiators "can achieve a 2 -degree goal is to shut

down the whole global economy."

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That is a severe overstatement, yet it underlines Anderson and Bows-Larkin's
point that we cannot achieve 8 to 10 percent annual cuts with the array of modest
carbon-pricing or green tech solutions usually advocated by Big Green. These
measures will certainly help, but they are simply not enough. That's because an 8
to 10 percent drop in emissions, year after year, is virtually unprecedented since
we started powering our economies with coal. In fact, cuts above 1 percent per
year "have historically been associated only with economic recession or
upheaval," as the economist Nicholas Stern put it in his 2006 report for the British
government.

Even after the Soviet Union collapsed, reductions of this duration and depth did
not happen (the former Soviet countries experienced average annual reductions of
roughly 5 percent over a period of ten years). Nor did this level of reduction happen
beyond a single-year blip after Wall Street crashed in 2008. Only in the immediate
aftermath of the great market crash of 1929 did the United States see emissions
drop for several consecutive years by more than 10 percent annually, but that was
the worst economic crisis of modern times. 52

If we are to avoid that kind of carnage while meeting our science-based
emissions targets, carbon reduction must be managed carefully through what
Anderson and Bows-Larkin describe as "radical and immediate de-growth

*51

strategies in the US, EU and other wealthy nations."

Now, I realize that this can all sound apocalyptic — as if reducing emissions
requires economic crises that result in mass suffering. But that seems so only
because we have an economic system that fetishizes GDP growth above all else,
regardless of the human or ecological consequences, while failing to place value
on those things that most of us cherish above all — a decent standard of living, a
measure of future security, and our relationships with one another. So what
Anderson and Bows-Larkin are really saying is that there is still time to avoid
catastrophic warming, but not within the rules of capitalism as they are currently
constructed. Which is surely the best argument there has ever been for changing
those rules.

Rather than pretending that we can solve the climate crisis without rocking the
economic boat, Anderson and Bows-Larkin argue, the time has come to tell the
truth, to "liberate the science from the economics, finance and astrology, stand by
the conclusions however uncomfortable ... we need to have the audacity to think

differently and conceive of alternative futures."

Interestingly, Anderson says that when he presents his radical findings in climate
circles, the core facts are rarely disputed. What he hears most often are confessions

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from colleagues that they have simply given up hope of meeting the 2 degree
temperature target, precisely because reaching it would require such a profound
challenge to economic growth. "This position is shared by many senior scientists

and economists advising government," Anderson reports.

In other words, changing the earth's climate in ways that will be chaotic and
disastrous is easier to accept than the prospect of changing the fundamental,
growth-based, profit-seeking logic of capitalism. We probably shouldn't be
surprised that some climate scientists are a little spooked by the radical
implications of their own research. Most of them were quietly measuring ice cores,
running global climate models, and studying ocean acidification, only to discover,
as Australian climate expert and author Clive Hamilton puts it, that in breaking the
news of the depth of our collective climate failure, they "were unwittingly
destabilizing the political and social order."

Nonetheless, that order has now been destabilized, which means that the rest of
us are going to have to quickly figure out how to turn "managed degrowth" into
something that looks a lot less like the Great Depression and a lot more like what
some innovative economic thinkers have taken to calling "The Great Transition."

Over the past decade, many boosters of green capitalism have tried to gloss over
the clashes between market logic and ecological limits by touting the wonders of
green tech, or the "decoupling" of environmental impacts from economic activity.
They paint a picture of a world that can continue to function pretty much as it does
now, but in which our power will come from renewable energy and all of our
various gadgets and vehicles will become so much more energy-efficient that we
can consume away without worrying about the impact.

If only humanity' s relationship with natural resources was that simple. While it
is true that renewable technologies hold tremendous promise to lower emissions,
the kinds of measures that would do so on the scale we need involve building vast
new electricity grids and transportation systems, often from the ground up. Even
if we started construction tomorrow, it would realistically take many years,
perhaps decades, before the new systems were up and running. Moreover, since
we don't yet have economies powered by clean energy, all that green construction
would have to burn a lot of fossil fuels in the interim — a necessary process, but
one that wouldn't lower our emissions fast enough. Deep emission cuts in the
wealthy nations have to start immediately. That means that if we wait for what

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Bows-Larkin describes as the "whiz -bang technologies" to come online "it will be

too little too late."

So what to do in the meantime? Well, we do what we can. And what we can
do — what doesn't require a technological and infrastructure revolution — is to
consume less, right away. Policies based on encouraging people to consume less
are far more difficult for our current political class to embrace than policies that
are about encouraging people to consume green. Consuming green just means
substituting one power source for another, or one model of consumer goods for a
more efficient one. The reason we have placed all of our eggs in the green tech and
green efficiency basket is precisely because these changes are safely within market
logic — indeed, they encourage us to go out and buy more new, efficient, green cars
and washing machines.

Consuming less, however, means changing how much energy we actually use:
how often we drive, how often we fly, whether our food has to be flown to get to
us, whether the goods we buy are built to last or to be replaced in two years, how
large our homes are. And these are the sorts of policies that have been neglected
so far. For instance, as researchers Rebecca Willis and Nick Eyre argue in a report
for the U.K.'s Green Alliance, despite the fact that groceries represent roughly 12
percent of greenhouse gas emissions in Britain, "there is virtually no government
policy which is aimed at changing the way we produce, incentivising farmers for
low energy farming, or how we consume, incentivising consumption of local and
seasonal food." Similarly, "there are incentives to drive more efficient cars, but

very little is done to discourage car dependent settlement patterns."

Plenty of people are attempting to change their daily lives in ways that do reduce
their consumption. But if these sorts of demand-side emission reductions are to
take place on anything like the scale required, they cannot be left to the lifestyle
decisions of earnest urbanites who like going to farmers' markets on Saturday
afternoons and wearing up-cycled clothing. We will need comprehensive policies
and programs that make low-carbon choices easy and convenient for everyone.
Most of all, these policies need to be fair, so that the people already struggling to
cover the basics are not being asked to make additional sacrifice to offset the
excess consumption of the rich. That means cheap public transit and clean light
rail accessible to all; affordable, energy-efficient housing along those transit lines;
cities planned for high-density living; bike lanes in which riders aren't asked to
risk their lives to get to work; land management that discourages sprawl and
encourages local, low-energy forms of agriculture; urban design that clusters
essential services like schools and health care along transit routes and in

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pedestrian-friendly areas; programs that require manufacturers to be responsible
for the electronic waste they produce, and to radically reduce built-in redundancies
and obsolescences.^ 2

And as hundreds of millions gain access to modern energy for the first time,
those who are consuming far more energy than they need would have to consume
less. How much less? Climate change deniers like to claim that environmentalists
want to return us to the Stone Age. The truth is that if we want to live within
ecological limits, we would need to return to a lifestyle similar to the one we had
in the 1970s, before consumption levels went crazy in the 1980s. Not exactly the
various forms of hardship and deprivation evoked at Heartland conferences. As
Kevin Anderson explains: "We need to give newly industrializing countries in the
world the space to develop and improve the welfare and well-being of their people.
This means more cuts in energy use by the developed world. It also means lifestyle
changes which will have most impact on the wealthy.... We've done this in the
past. In the 1960s and 1970s we enjoyed a healthy and moderate lifestyle and we
need to return to this to keep emissions under control. It is a matter of the well-off
20 percent in a population taking the largest cuts. A more even society might result
and we would certainly benefit from a lower carbon and more sustainable way of
life."-

There is no doubt that these types of policies have countless benefits besides
lower emissions. They encourage civic space, physical activity, community
building, as well as cleaner air and water. They also do a huge amount to reduce
inequality, since it is low-income people, often people of color, who benefit most
from improvements in public housing and public transit. And if strong living-wage
and hire-local provisions were included in transition plans, they could also benefit
most from the jobs building and running those expanded services, while becoming
less dependent on jobs in dirty industries that have been disproportionately
concentrated in low-income communities of color.

As Phaedra Ellis-Lamkins of the environmental justice organization Green for
All puts it, "The tools we use to combat climate change are the same tools we can
use to change the game for low-income Americans and people of color. . . . We need
Congress to make the investments necessary to upgrade and repair our crumbling
infrastructure — from building seawalls that protect shoreline communities to
fixing our storm-water systems. Doing so will create family- sustaining, local jobs.
Improving our storm-water infrastructure alone would put 2 million Americans to
work. We need to make sure that people of color are a part of the business
community and workforce building these new systems."^

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Another way of thinking about this is that what is needed is a fundamental
reordering of the component parts of Gross Domestic Product. GDP is traditionally
understood to consist ofconsumption plus investment plus government
spending plus net exports. The free market capitalism of the past three decades has
put the emphasis particularly on consumption and trade. But as we remake our
economies to stay within our global carbon budget, we need to see less
consumption (except among the poor), less trade (as we relocalize our economies),
and less private investment in producing for excessive consumption. These
reductions would be offset by increased government spending, and increased
public and private investment in the infrastructure and alternatives needed to
reduce our emissions to zero. Implicit in all of this is a great deal more
redistribution, so that more of us can live comfortably within the planet's capacity.

Which is precisely why, when climate change deniers claim that global warming
is a plot to redistribute wealth, it's not (only) because they are paranoid. It's also
because they are paying attention.

Growing the Caring Economy, Shrinking the Careless One

A great deal of thought in recent years has gone into how reducing our use of
material resources could be managed in ways that actually improve quality of life
overall — what the French call "selective degrowth." Policies like luxury taxes
could be put in place to discourage wasteful consumption.^ 2 The money raised
could be used to support those parts of our economies that are already low-carbon
and therefore do not need to contract. Obviously a huge number of jobs would be
created in the sectors that are part of the green transition — in mass transit,
renewable energy, weatherization, and ecosystem restoration. And those sectors
that are not governed by the drive for increased yearly profit (the public sector, co-
ops, local businesses, nonprofits) would expand their share of overall economic
activity, as would those sectors with minimal ecological impact (such as the
caregiving professions, which tend to be occupied by women and people of color
and therefore underpaid). "Expanding our economies in these directions has all
sorts of advantages," Tim Jackson, an economist at the University of Surrey and
author of Prosperity Without Growth, has written. "In the first place, the time spent
by these professions directly improves the quality of our lives. Making them more
and more efficient is not, after a certain point, actually desirable. What sense does

THIS CHANGES EVERYTHING | 81

it make to ask our teachers to teach ever bigger classes? Our doctors to treat more

and more patients per hour?"

There could be other benefits too, like shorter work hours, in part to create more
jobs, but also because overworked people have less time to engage in low-
consumption activities like gardening and cooking (because they are just too busy).
Indeed, a number of researchers have analyzed the very concrete climate benefits
of working less. John Stutz, a senior fellow at the Boston-based Tellus Institute,
envisions that "hours of paid work and income could converge worldwide at
substantially lower levels than is seen in the developed countries today." If
countries aimed for somewhere around three to four days a week, introduced
gradually over a period of decades, he argues, it could offset much of the emissions

growth projected through 2030 while improving quality of life.

Many degrowth and economic justice thinkers also call for the introduction of a
basic annual income, a wage given to every person, regardless of income, as a
recognition that the system cannot provide jobs for everyone and that it is
counterproductive to force people to work in jobs that simply fuel consumption.
As Alyssa Battistoni, an editor at the joumalJacobin, writes, "While making
people work shitty jobs to 'earn' a living has always been spiteful, it's now starting
to seem suicidal." 65

A basic income that discourages shitty work (and wasteful consumption) would
also have the benefit of providing much-needed economic security in the front-line
communities that are being asked to sacrifice their health so that oil companies can
refine tar sands oil or gas companies can drill another fracking well. Nobody wants
to have their water contaminated or have their kids suffer from asthma. But
desperate people can be counted on to do desperate things — which is why we all
have a vested interest in taking care of one another so that many fewer
communities are faced with those impossible choices. That means rescuing the
idea of a safety net that ensures that everyone has the basics covered: health care,
education, food, and clean water. Indeed, fighting inequality on every front and
through multiple means must be understood as a central strategy in the battle
against climate change.

This kind of carefully planned economy holds out the possibility of much more
humane, fulfilling lifestyles than the vast majority of us are experiencing under our
current system, which is what makes the idea of a massive social movement
coalescing behind such demands a real possibility. But these policies are also the
most politically challenging.

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Unlike encouraging energy efficiency, the measures we must take to secure a
just, equitable, and inspiring transition away from fossil fuels clash directly with
our reigning economic orthodoxy at every level. As we will see, such a shift breaks
all the ideological rules — it requires visionary long-term planning, tough
regulation of business, higher levels of taxation for the affluent, big public sector
expenditure, and in many cases reversals of core privatizations in order to give
communities the power to make the changes they desire. In short, it means
changing everything about how we think about the economy so that our pollution
doesn't change everything about our physical world.

~ China has of course emerged as the world's dominant supplier of inexpensive modules, and in that role
has helped to drive dramatic drops in solar prices. It has also flooded the market with cheap panels in recent
years, contributing to a global oversupply that has outpaced demand.

" And they don't let developing countries like China and India off the hook. According to their projections,
developing countries can have just one more decade to continue to increase their emissions to aid their
efforts to pull themselves out of poverty while switching over to green energy sources. By 2025, they would
need to be cutting emissions "at an unprecedented 7 per cent" a year as well.

" A law passed by the European Parliament that would require that all cell phone manufacturers offer a
common battery charger is a small step in the right direction. Similarly, requiring that electronics
manufacturers use recycled metals like copper could save a great many communities from one of the most
toxic mining processes in the world.

" In French, "decroissance" has the double meaning of challenging both growth, croissance, and croire, to
believe — invoking the idea of choosing not to believe in the fiction of perpetual growth on a finite planet.

THIS CHANGES EVERYTHING | 83

PUBLIC AND PAID FOR

Overcoming the Ideological Blocks to the Next Economy

"We have no option but to reinvent mobility ... much of India still takes
the bus, walks or cycles — in many cities as much as 20 percent of the
population bikes. We do this because we are poor. Now the challenge is
to reinvent city planning so that we can do this as we become rich."

— Sunita Narain, director general, Centre for Science and Environment, 20 13 1

"The lady in the Rolls-Royce car is more damaging to morale than a fleet
of Goring's bombing-planes."

-George Orwell, The Lion and the Unicorn, 1941

It was a tight vote but on September 22, 2013, residents of Germany's second
largest city decided to take their power back. On that day, 50.9 percent of
Hamburg's voters cast their ballots in favor of putting their electricity, gas, and
heating grids under the control of the city, reversing a wave of corporate sell-offs

that took place over a decade earlier.

It's a process that has been given a few clunky names, including "re-
municipalization" and "re-communalization." But the people involved tend to
simply refer to their desire for "local power."

The Our Hamburg-Our Grid coalition made a series of persuasive arguments in
favor of taking back the utilities. A locally controlled energy system would be
concerned with public interests, not profits. Residents would have greater
democratic say in their energy system, they argued, rather than having the
decisions that affect them made in distant boardrooms. Andmoney earned in the
sale of energy would be returned to the city, rather than lost to the shareholders of
multinationals that had control over the grids at the time — a definite plus during a

THIS CHANGES EVERYTHING | 84

time of relentless public austerity. "For people it's self-evident that goods on which
everybody is dependent should belong to the public," campaign organizer Wiebke

Hansen explained in an interview.

There was something else driving the campaign as well. Many of Hamburg's
residents wanted to be part of Energiewende: the fast- spreading transition to green,
renewable energy that was sweeping the country, with nearly 25 percent of
Germany's electricity in 2013 coming from renewables, dominated by wind and
solar but also including some biogas and hydro — up from around 6 percent in
2000. In comparison, wind and solar made up just 4 percent of total U.S. electricity
generation in 2013. The cities of Frankfurt and Munich, which had never sold off
their energy grids, had already joined the transition and pledged to move to 100
percent renewable energy by 2050 and 2025, respectively. But Hamburg and
Berlin, which had both gone the privatization route, were lagging behind. And this
was a central argument for proponents of taking back Hamburg's grid: it would
allow them to get off coal and nuclear and go green."

Much has been written about Germany's renewable energy transition —
particularly the speed at which it is being achieved, as well as the ambition of its
future targets (the country is aiming for 55-60 percent renewables by 2035)." The
weaknesses of the program have also been hotly debated, particularly the question
of whether the decision to phase out nuclear energy has led to a resurgence of coal
(more on that next chapter).

In all of this analysis, however, scarce attention has been paid to one key factor
that has made possible what may be the world's most rapid shift to wind and solar
power: the fact that in hundreds of cities and towns across the country, citizens
have voted to take their energy grids back from the private corporations that
purchased them. As Anna Leidreiter, a climate campaigner with the World Future
Council, observed after the Hamburg vote, "This marks a clear reversal to the
neoliberal policies of the 1990s, when large numbers of German municipalities
sold their public services to large corporations as money was needed to prop up

city budgets."

Nor is this some small trend. According to a Bloomberg report, "More than 70
new municipal utilities have started up since 2007, and public operators have taken
over more than 200 concessions to run energy grids from private companies in that
time." And though there are no national statistics, the German Association of Local
Utilities believes many more cities and towns than that have taken back control
over their grids from outside corporations.

THIS CHANGES EVERYTHING | 85

Most surprising has been the force with which large parts of the German public
have turned against energy privatization. In 2013 in Berlin 83 percent of
participating voters cast their ballots in favor of switching to a publicly owned
power utility based eventually on 100 percent renewable energy. Not enough
people turned out to vote for the decision to be binding (though the campaign came
very close), but the referendum made public opinion so clear that campaigners are
still pushing for a nonprofit cooperative to take over the grid when the current

contract ends.

Energy privatization reversals — linked specifically to a desire for renewable
energy — have started to spread beyond Germany in recent years, including to the
United States. For instance, in the mid-2000s, residents and local officials in the
liberal city of Boulder, Colorado, began lobbying their privatized power utility to
move away from coal and toward renewable energy. The company, the
Minneapolis-based Xcel Energy, wasn't particularly interested, so a coalition of
environmentalists and an energetic youth group called New Era Colorado came to
the same conclusion as the voters in Germany: they had to take their grid back.
Steve Fenberg of New Era explains, "We have one of the most carbon-intensive
energy supplies in the country, and [Boulder] is an environmentally minded
community, and we wanted to change that. We realized that we had no control
over that unless we controlled the energy supply." 1 ^

In 2011, despite being outspent by Xcel by ten to one, the pro-renewables
coalition narrowly won two ballot measures that called on the city of Boulder to
consider buying back its power system. 11 The vote did not immediately put the
power utility under public control, but it gave the city the authority and financing
to seriously consider the option (which it is currently doing). The coalition won
another crucial vote in 2013 against an Xcel- supported initiative that would have
blocked the formation of a new public utility, this time by a wide majority.

These were historic votes: other cities had reversed earlier privatizations because
they were unhappy with the quality of the service or the pricing under the private
operator. But this was the first time a U.S. city was taking these steps "for the sole
purpose of reducing its impact on the planet," according to Tim Hillman, a
Boulder-based environmental engineer. Indeed the pro-public forces had put
fighting climate change front and center in their campaigns, accusing Xcel of being
just another fossil fuel company standing in the way of much needed climate
action. And according to Fenberg, their vision reaches beyond Boulder. "We want
to show the world that you can actually power a city responsibly and not pay a lot

THIS CHANGES EVERYTHING | 86

for it," he now says. "We want this to be a model, not just do this one cool thing

for ourselves in our community."

What stands out about Boulder's experience is that, unlike some of the German
campaigns, it did not begin with opposition to privatization. Boulder's local power
movement began with the desire to switch to clean energy, regardless of who was
providing it. Yet in the process of trying to achieve that goal, these residents
discovered that they had no choice but to knock down one of the core ideological
pillars of the free market era: that privately run services are always superior to
public ones. It was an accidental discovery very similar to the one Ontario residents
made when it became clear that their green energy transition was being
undermined by free trade commitments signed long ago.

Though rarely mentioned in climate policy discussions, there is a clear and
compelling relationship between public ownership and the ability of communities
to get off dirty energy. Many of the countries with the highest commitments to
renewable energy are ones that have managed to keep large parts of their electricity
sectors in public (and often local) hands, including the Netherlands, Austria, and
Norway. In the U.S., some of the cities that have set the most ambitious green
energy targets also happen to have public utilities. Austin, Texas, for instance, is
ahead of schedule for meeting its target of 35 percent renewable power by 2020,
and Sacramento, California's, utility is gearing up to beat a similar target and has
set a pioneering goal of reducing emissions by 90 percent by mid-century. On the
other hand, according to John Farrell, senior researcher at the Minneapolis-based
Institute for Local Self-Reliance, the attitude of most private players has been,
"we're going to take the money that we make from selling fossil fuels, and use it

to lobby as hard as we can against any change to the way that we do business."

This does not mean that private power monopolies will not offer their customers
the option of purchasing power from renewables as part of a mix that includes
fossil fuels: many do offer that choice, usually at a premium price. And some offer
renewable power exclusively, though this is invariably from large-scale
hydropower. Nor is it the case that public power will always willingly go green —
there are plenty of publicly owned power utilities that remain hooked on coal and
are highly resistant to change.

However, many communities are discovering that while public utilities often
need to be pressured hard to make emission reductions a priority (a process that
may require fundamental reform to make them more democratic and accountable
to their constituents) private energy monopolies offer no such option. Answerable
chiefly to their shareholders and driven by the need for high quarterly profits,

THIS CHANGES EVERYTHING | 87

private companies will voluntarily embrace renewables only if it won't impact
their earnings or if they are forced to by law. If renewables are seen as less
profitable, at least in the short term, these bottom- line companies simply won't
make the switch. Which is why, as German antinuclear activist Ralf Gauger puts
it, more and more people are coming to the conclusion that, "Energy supply and
environmental issues should not be left in the hands of private for-profit

,,14

interests.

This does not mean that the private sector should be excluded from a transition
to renewables: solar and wind companies are already bringing clean energy to
many millions of consumers around the world, including through innovative
leasing models that allow customers to avoid the up-front costs of purchasing their
own rooftop solar panels. But despite these recent successes, the market has proved
extremely volatile and according to projections from the International Energy
Agency, investment levels in clean energy need to quadruple by 2030 if we are to
meet emission targets aimed at staying below 2 degrees Celsius of warming. 15

It's easy to mistake a thriving private market in green energy for a credible
climate action plan, but, though related, they are not the same thing. It's entirely
possible to have a booming market in renewables, with a whole new generation of
solar and wind entrepreneurs growing very wealthy — and for our countries to still
fall far short of lowering emissions in line with science in the brief time we have
left. To be sure of hitting those tough targets, we need systems that are more
reliable than boom-and-bust private markets. And as a 2013 paper produced by a
research team at the University of Greenwich explains, "Historically, the private
sector has played little role in investing in renewable energy generation.
Governments have been responsible for nearly all such investments. Current
experience from around the world, including the markets of Europe, also shows
that private companies and electricity markets cannot deliver investments in
renewables on the scale required."

Citing various instances of governments turning to the public sector to drive
their transitions (including the German experience), as well as examples of large
corporate-driven renewable projects that were abandoned by their investors
midstream, the Greenwich research team concludes, "An active role for
government and public sector utilities is thus a far more important condition for
developing renewable energy than any expensive system of public subsidies for
markets or private investors." 12

Sorting out what mechanisms have the best chance of pulling off a dramatic and
enormously high-stakes energy transition has become particularly pressing of late.

THIS CHANGES EVERYTHING | 88

That's because it is now clear that — at least from a technical perspective — it is
entirely possible to rapidly switch our energy systems to 100 percent renewables.
In 2009, Mark Z. Jacobson, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at
Stanford University, and Mark A. Delucchi, a research scientist at the Institute of
Transportation Studies at the University of California, Davis, authored a
groundbreaking, detailed road map for "how 100 percent of the world's energy,
for all purposes, could be supplied by wind, water and solar resources, by as early
as 2030." The plan includes not only power generation but also transportation as
well as heating and cooling. Later published in the joumsilEnergy Policy, the road
map is one of several credible studies that have come out in recent years that show
how wealthy countries and regions can shift all, or almost all, of their energy

infrastructure to renewables within a twenty-to-forty-year time frame. Those
studies demonstrating the potential for rapid progress include:

• In Australia, the University of Melbourne's Energy Institute and the nonprofit

Beyond Zero Emissions have published a blueprint for achieving a 60 percent

solar and 40 percent wind electricity system in an astonishing ten years.

• By 2014, the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)
had concluded from its own extensive research into weather patterns that cost-
effective wind and solar could constitute nearly 60 percent of the U.S. electricity
system by 2030.-

• Among more conservative projections, a major 2012 study by the U.S.

Department of Energy's National Renewable Energy Laboratory argues that
wind, solar, and other currently available green technologies could meet 80

percent of Americans' electricity needs by 2050.

Most promising of all is new work by a team of researchers at Stanford, led by
Mark Jacobson (who coauthored the 2009 global plan). In March 2013, they
published a study in Energy Policy showing that New York state could meet all of
its power needs with renewables by 2030. Jacobson and his colleagues are
developing similar plans for every U.S. state, and have already published numbers
for the country as a whole. "It's absolutely not true that we need natural gas, coal
or oil — we think it's a myth," he told The New York Times.

"This really involves a large scale transformation," he says. "It would require an
effort comparable to the Apollo moon project or constructing the interstate
highway system. But it is possible, without even having to go to new technologies.
We really need to just decide collectively that this is the direction we want to head
as a society." And he is clear on what stands in the way: "The biggest obstacles

are social and political — what you need is the will to do it."

THIS CHANGES EVERYTHING | 89

In fact it takes more than will: it requires the profound ideological shift already
discussed. Because our governments have changed dramatically since the days
when ambitious national projects were conceived and implemented. And the
imperatives created by the climate crisis are colliding with the dominant logic of
our time on many other fronts.

Indeed every time a new, record-breaking natural disaster fills our screens with
human horror, we have more reminders of how climate change demands that we
invest in the publicly owned bones of our societies, made brittle by decades of
neglect.

Rebuilding, and Reinventing, the Public Sphere

When I first spotted Nastaran Mohit, she was bundled in a long puffy black coat,
a white toque pulled halfway over her eyes, barking orders to volunteers gathered
in an unheated warehouse. "Take a sticky pad and write down what the needs are,"
the fast-talking thirty-year-old was telling a group newly designated as Team 1 .
"Okay, head on out. Who is Team 2?"-

It was ten days after Superstorm Sandy made landfall and we were in one of the
hardest-hit neighborhoods in the Rockaways, a long, narrow strip of seaside
communities in Queens, New York. The storm waters had receded but hundreds
of basements were still flooded and power and cell phone service were still out.
The National Guard patrolled the streets in trucks and Humvees, making sure
curfew was observed, but when it came to offering help to those stranded in the
cold and dark, the state and the big aid agencies were largely missing in action.
(Or, more accurately, they were at the other, wealthier end of the Rockaway
peninsula, where these organizations and agencies were a strong and helpful

.25

presence.)

Seeing this abandonment, thousands of mostly young volunteers had organized
themselves under the banner "Occupy Sandy" (many were veterans of Occupy
Wall Street) and were distributing clothes, blankets, and hot food to residents of
neglected areas. They set up recovery hubs in community centers and churches,
and went door-to-door in the area's notorious, towering brick housing projects,
some as high as twenty-three stories. "Muck" had become a ubiquitous verb, as in
"Do you need us to come muck out your basement?" If the answer was yes, a team
of eager twenty-somethings would show up on the doorstep with mops, gloves,
shovels, and bleach, ready to get the job done.

THIS CHANGES EVERYTHING | 90

Mohit had arrived in the Rockaways to help distribute basic supplies but quickly
noticed a more pressing need: in some areas, absolutely no one was providing
health care. And the need was so great, it scared her. Since the 1950s, the
Rockaways — once a desirable resort destination — had become a dumping ground
for New York's poor and unwanted: welfare recipients, the elderly, discharged
mental patients. They were crammed into high-rises, many in a part of the
peninsula known locally as the "Baghdad of Queens."

As in so many places like it, public services in the Rockaways had been cut to
the bone, and then cut some more. Just six months before the storm, Peninsula
Hospital Center — one of only two hospitals in the area, which served a low-income
and elderly population — had shut down after the state Department of Health
refused to step in. Walk-in clinics had attempted to fill the gap but they had flooded
during the storm and, along with the pharmacies, had not yet reopened. "This is

just a dead-zone," Mohit sighed.

So she and friends in Occupy Sandy called all the doctors and nurses they knew
and asked them to bring in whatever supplies they could. Next, they convinced the
owner of an old furrier, damaged in the storm, to let them convert his storefront on
the neighborhood's main drag into a makeshift MASH unit. There, amidst the
animal pelts hanging from the ceiling, volunteer doctors and nurses began to see
patients, treat wounds, write prescriptions, and provide trauma counseling.

There was no shortage of patients; in its first two weeks, Mohit estimated that
the clinic helped hundreds of people. But on the day I visited, worries were
mounting about the people still stuck in the high-rises. As volunteers went door-
to-door distributing supplies in the darkened projects, flashlights strapped to their
foreheads, they were finding alarming numbers of sick people. Cancer and
HIV/ AIDS meds had run out, oxygen tanks were empty, diabetics were out of
insulin, and addicts were in withdrawal. Some people were too sick to brave the
dark stairwells and multiple flights of stairs to get help; some didn't leave because
they had nowhere to go and no way to get off the peninsula (subways and buses
were not operating); others feared that if they left their apartments, their homes
would be burglarized. And without cell service or power for their TVs, many had
no idea what was going on outside.

Most shockingly, residents reported that until Occupy Sandy showed up, no one
had knocked on their doors since the storm. Not from the Health Department, nor
the city Housing Authority (responsible for running the projects), nor the big relief
agencies like the Red Cross. "I was like 'Holy crap,' "Mohit told me. "There was

*28

just no medical attention at all." Referring to the legendary abandonment of New

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Orleans's poor residents when the city flooded in 2005, she said: "This is Katrina

2.0.

The most frustrating part was that even when a pressing health need was
identified, and even when the volunteer doctors wrote the required prescriptions,
"we bring it to the pharmacy and the pharmacy is sending it back to us because
they need insurance information. And then we get as much information as we can

and we bring it back and they say, 'Now we need their Social Security number.' "~
According to a 2009 Harvard Medical School study, as many as 45,000 people
die annually in the United States because they lack health insurance. As one of the
study's coauthors pointed out, this works out to about one death every twelve
minutes. It's unclear how President Obama's stunted 2010 health care law will
change those numbers, but watching the insurance companies continue to put
money before human health in the midst of the worst storm in New York' s history
cast this preexisting injustice in a new, more urgent light. "We need universal
health care," Mohit declared. "There is no other way around it. There is absolutely
no other way around it." Anyone who disagreed should come to the disaster zone,
she said, because this "is a perfect situation for people to really examine how

nonsensical, inhumane, and barbaric this system is."

The word "apocalypse" derives from the Greek apokalypsis, which means
"something uncovered" or revealed. Besides the need for a dramatically better
health care system, there was much else uncovered and revealed when the
floodwaters retreated in New York that October. The disaster revealed how
dangerous it is to be dependent on centralized forms of energy that can be knocked
out in one blow. It revealed the life- and- death cost of social isolation, since it was
the people who did not know their neighbors, or who were frightened of them, who
were most at risk. Meanwhile, it was the tightest-knit communities, where
neighbors took responsibility for one another's safety, that were best able to
literally weather the storm.

The disaster also revealed the huge risks that come with deep inequality, since
the people who were already the most vulnerable — undocumented workers, the
formerly incarcerated, people in public housing — suffered most and longest. In
low-income neighborhoods, homes filled not only with water but with heavy
chemicals and detergents — the legacy of systemic environmental racism that
allowed toxic industries to build in areas inhabited mostly by people of color.
Public housing projects that had been left to decay — while the city bided its time
before selling them off to developers — turned into death traps, their ancient
plumbing and electrical systems giving way completely. As Aria Doe, executive

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director of the Action Center for Education and Community Development in the
Rockaways, put it, the peninsula's poorest residents "were six feet under" before

the storm even hit. "Right now, they're seven or eight feet under."

All around the world, the hard realities of a warming world are crashing up against
the brutal logic of austerity, revealing just how untenable it is to starve the public
sphere at the very moment we need it most. The floods that hit the U.K. in the
winter of 2013-2014, for instance, would have been trying for any government:
thousands of homes and workplaces were inundated, hundreds of thousands of
houses and other buildings lost power, farmland was submerged, several rail lines
were down for weeks, all combining to create what one top official called an
"almost unparalleled natural disaster." This as the country was still reeling from a

previous devastating storm that had struck just two months before.

But the floods were particularly awkward for the coalition government led by
Conservative prime minister David Cameron because, in the three years prior, it
had gutted the Environment Agency (EA), which was responsible for dealing with
flooding. Since 2009, at least 1,150 jobs had been lost at the agency, with as many
as 1,700 more on the chopping block, adding up to approximately a quarter of its
total workforce. In 2012 The Guardian had revealed that "nearly 300 flood defence
schemes across England [had] been left unbuilt due to government budget cuts."
The head of the Environment Agency had stated plainly during the most recent

round of cuts that "Flood risk maintenance will be impacted."

Cameron is no climate change denier, which is what made it all the more
incredible that he had hobbled the agency responsible for protecting the public
from rising waters and more ferocious storms, two well-understood impacts of
climate change. And his praise of the good works of the staff that had survived his
axe provided cold comfort. "It is a disgrace that the Government is happy to put
cost cutting before public safety and protecting family homes," announced the
trade union representing EA workers in a scathing statement. "They can't have it
both ways, praising the sterling work of members in the Agency in one breath, and

in the next breath announcing further damaging cuts."

During good times, it's easy to deride "big government" and talk about the
inevitability of cutbacks. But during disasters, most everyone loses their free
market religion and wants to know that their government has their backs. And if
there is one thing we can be sure of, it's that extreme weather events like
Superstorm Sandy, Typhoon Haiyan in the Philippines, and the British floods —

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disasters that, combined, pummeled coastlines beyond recognition, ravaged
millions of homes, and killed many thousands — are going to keep coming.

Over the course of the 1970s, there were 660 reported disasters around the world,
including droughts, floods, extreme temperature events, wildfires, and storms. In
the 2000s, there were 3,322 — a fivefold boost. That is a staggering increase in just
over thirty years, and clearly global warming cannot be said to have "caused" all
of it. But the climate signal is also clear. "There's no question that climate change
has increased the frequency of certain types of extreme weather events," climate
scientist Michael Mann told me in an interview, "including drought, intense
hurricanes, and super typhoons, the frequency and intensity and duration of heat
waves, and potentially other types of extreme weather though the details are still
being debated within the scientific community."^

Yet these are the same three decades in which almost every government in the
world has been steadily chipping away at the health and resilience of the public
sphere. And it is this neglect that, over and over again, turns natural disasters into
unnatural catastrophes. Storms burst through neglected levees. Heavy rain causes
decrepit sewer systems to back up and overflow. Wildfires rage out of control for
lack of workers and equipment to fight them (in Greece, fire departments can't
afford spare tires for their trucks driving into forest blazes). Emergency responders
are missing in action for days after a major hurricane. Bridges and tunnels, left in
a state of disrepair, collapse under the added pressure.

The costs of coping with increasing weather extremes are astronomical. In the
United States, each major disaster seems to cost taxpayers upward of a billion
dollars. The cost of Superstorm Sandy is estimated at $65 billion. And that was
just one year after Hurricane Irene caused around $10 billion in damage, just one
episode in a year that saw fourteen billion- dollar disasters in the U.S. alone.
Globally, 2011 holds the title as the costliest year ever for disasters, with total
damages reaching at least $380 billion. And with policymakers still locked in the
vise grip of austerity logic, these rising emergency expenditures are being offset
with cuts to everyday public spending, which will make societies even more

vulnerable during the next disaster — a classic vicious cycle.

It was never a good idea to neglect the foundations of our societies in this way.
In the context of climate change, however, that decision looks suicidal. There are
many important debates to be had about the best way to respond to climate
change — storm walls or ecosystem restoration? Decentralized renewables,
industrial scale wind power combined with natural gas, or nuclear power? Small-
scale organic farms or industrial food systems? There is, however, no scenario in

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which we can avoid wartime levels of spending in the public sector — not if we are
serious about preventing catastrophic levels of warming, and minimizing the
destructive potential of the coming storms.

It' s no mystery where that public money needs to be spent. Much of it should go
to the kinds of ambitious emission-reducing projects already discussed — the smart
grids, the light rail, the citywide composting systems, the building retrofits, the
visionary transit systems, the urban redesigns to keep us from spending half our
lives in traffic jams. The private sector is ill suited to taking on most of these large
infrastructure investments: if the services are to be accessible, which they must be
in order to be effective, the profit margins that attract private players simply aren't
there.

Transit is a good example. In March 2014, when air pollution in French cities
reached dangerously high levels, officials in Paris made a snap decision to
discourage car use by making public transit free for three days. Obviously private
operators would strenuously resist such measures. And yet by all rights, our transit
systems should be responding with the same kind of urgency to dangerously high
levels of atmospheric carbon. Rather than allowing subway and bus fares to rise
while service erodes, we need to be lowering prices and expanding services —
regardless of the costs.

Public dollars also need to go to the equally important, though less glamorous
projects and services that will help us prepare for the coming heavy weather. That
includes things like hiring more firefighters and improving storm barriers. And it
means coming up with new, nonprofit disaster insurance programs so that people
who have lost everything to a hurricane or a forest fire are not left at the mercy of
a private insurance industry that is already adapting to climate change by avoiding
payouts and slapping victims with massive rate increases. According to Amy Bach,
cofounder of the San Francisco-based advocacy group United Policyholders,
disaster insurance is becoming "very much like health insurance. We're going to
have to increasingly take the profit motive out of the system so that it operates
efficiently and effectively, but without generating obscene executive salaries and
bonuses and shareholder returns. Because it's not going to be a sustainable model.
A publicly traded insurance company in the face of climate change is not a
sustainable business model for the end user, the consumer." It's that or a disaster
capitalism free-for-all; those are the choices.

These types of improvements are of course in far greater demand in developing
countries like the Philippines, Kenya, and Bangladesh that are already facing some
of the most severe climate impacts. Hundreds of billions of dollars are urgently

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needed to build seawalls; storage and distribution networks for food, water, and
medicine; early warning systems and shelters for hurricanes, cyclones, and
tsunamis — as well as public health systems able to cope with increases in climate -

related diseases like malaria. Though mechanisms to protect against government
corruption are needed, these countries should not have to spend their health care
and education budgets on costly disaster insurance plans purchased from
transnational corporations, as is happening right now. Their people should be
receiving direct compensation from the countries (and companies) most
responsible for warming the planet.

The Polluter Pays

About now a sensible reader would be asking: how on earth are we going to pay
for all this? It's the essential question. A 2011 survey by the U.N. Department of
Economic and Social Affairs looked at how much it would cost for humanity to
"overcome poverty, increase food production to eradicate hunger without
degrading land and water resources, and avert the climate change catastrophe."
The price tag was $1.9 trillion a year for the next forty years — and "at least one
half of the required investments would have to be realized in developing

.-,,40

countries.

As we all know, public spending is going in the opposite direction almost
everywhere except for a handful of fast- growing so-called emerging economies.
In North America and Europe, the economic crisis that began in 2008 is still being
used as a pretext to slash aid abroad and cut climate programs at home. All over
Southern Europe, environmental policies and regulations have been clawed back,
most tragically in Spain, which, facing fierce austerity pressure, drastically cut
subsidies for renewables projects, sending solar projects and wind farms spiraling
toward default and closure. The U.K. under David Cameron has also cut supports
for renewable energy.

So if we accept that governments are broke, and they're not likely to introduce
"quantitative easing" (aka printing money) for the climate system as they have for
the banks, where is the money supposed to come from? Since we have only a few
short years to dramatically lower our emissions, the only rational way forward is
to fully embrace the principle already well established in Western law: the polluter
pays.

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The fossil fuel companies have known for decades that their core product was
warming the planet, and yet they have not only failed to adapt to that reality, they
have actively blocked progress at every turn. Meanwhile, oil and gas companies
remain some of the most profitable corporations in history, with the top five oil
companies pulling in $900 billion in profits from 2001 to 2010. ExxonMobil still
holds the record for the highest corporate profits ever reported in the United States,
earning $41 billion in 2011 and $45 billion in 2012. These companies are rich,
quite simply, because they have dumped the cost of cleaning up their mess onto
regular people around the world. It is this situation that, most fundamentally, needs
to change.

And it will not change without strong action. For well over a decade, several of
the oil majors have claimed to be voluntarily using their profits to invest in a shift
to renewable energy. In 2000, BP rebranded itself "Beyond Petroleum" and even
changed its logo to a sunburst, called "the Helios mark after the sun god of ancient
Greece." ("We are not an oil company," then-chief executive Sir John Browne said
at the time, explaining that, "We are aware the world wants less carbon-intensive
fuels. What we want to do is create options.") Chevron, for its part, ran a high-
profile advertising campaign declaring, "It's time oil companies get behind
renewables.... We agree." But according to a study by the Center for American
Progress, just 4 percent of the Big Five's $100 billion in combined profits in 2008
went to "renewable and alternative energy ventures." Instead, they continue to
pour their profits into shareholder pockets, outrageous executive pay (Exxon CEO
Rex Tillerson makes more than $100,000 a day), and new technologies designed

to extract even dirtier and more dangerous fossil fuels.

And even as the demand for renewables increases, the percentage the fossil fuel
companies spend on them keeps shrinking — by 2011, most of the majors were
spending less than 1 percent of their overall expenditures on alternative energy,
with Chevron and Shell spending a deeply unimpressive 2.5 percent. In 2014,
Chevron pulled back even further. According to Bloomberg Businessweek, the
staff of a renewables division that had almost doubled its target profits was told
"that funding for the effort would dry up" and was urged "to find jobs elsewhere."
Chevron also moved to sell off businesses that had developed green projects for
governments and school districts. As oil industry watcher Antonia Juhasz has
observed, "You wouldn't know it from their advertising, but the world's major oil
companies have either entirely divested from alternative energy or significantly
reduced their investments in favor of doubling down on ever-more risky and

destructive sources of oil and natural gas."^

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Given this track record, it's safe to assume that if fossil fuel companies are going
to help pay for the shift to renewable energy, and for the broader costs of a climate
destabilized by their pollution, it will be because they are forced to do so by law.
Just as tobacco companies have been obliged to pay the costs of helping people to
quit smoking, and BP has had to pay for much of the cleanup of its oil spill in the
Gulf of Mexico, it is high time for the industry to at least split the bill for the
climate crisis. And there is mounting evidence that the financial world understands
that this is coming. In its 2013 annual report on "Global Risks," the World
Economic Forum (host of the annual superelite gathering in Davos), stated plainly,
"Although the Alaskan village of Kivalina — which faces being 'wiped out' by the
changing climate — was unsuccessful in its attempts to file a US$ 400 million
lawsuit against oil and coal companies, future plaintiffs may be more successful.
Five decades ago, the U.S. tobacco industry would not have suspected that in 1997

it would agree to pay $368 billion in health-related damages." But it did.

The question is: how do we stop fossil fuel profits from continuing to
hemorrhage into executive paychecks and shareholder pockets — and how do we
do it soon, before the companies are significantly less profitable or out of business
because we have moved to a new energy system? As the Global Risks report
suggests, communities severely impacted by climate change have made several
attempts to use the courts to sue for damages, but so far they have been
unsuccessful. A steep carbon tax would be a straightforward way to get a piece of
the profits, as long as it contained a generous redistributive mechanism — a tax cut
or income credit — that compensated poor and middle-class consumers for
increased fuel and heating prices. As Canadian economist Marc Lee points out,
designed properly, "It is possible to have a progressive carbon tax system that

reduces inequality as it raises the price of emitting greenhouse gases." An even
more direct route to getting a piece of those pollution profits would be for
governments to negotiate much higher royalty rates on oil, gas, and coal extraction,
with the revenues going to "heritage trust funds" that would be dedicated to
building the post-fossil fuel future, as well as to helping communities and workers
adapt to these new realities.

Fossil fuel corporations can be counted on to resist any new rules that cut into
their profits, so harsh penalties, including revoking corporate charters, would need
to be on the table. Companies would threaten to pull out of certain operations, to
be sure, but once a multinational like Shell has spent billions to build the mines
and drilling platforms needed to extract fossil fuels, it is unlikely to abandon that

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infrastructure because royalties go up. (Though it will bitterly complain and may
well seek damages at an investment tribunal.)

But the extractive industries shouldn't be the only targets of the "polluter pays"
principle. The U.S. military is by some accounts the largest single consumer of
petroleum in the world. In 201 1, the Department of Defense released, at minimum,
56.6 million metric tons of CO2 equivalent into the atmosphere, more than the

U.S. -based operations of ExxonMobil and Shell combined. So surely the arms
companies should pay their share. The car companies have plenty to answer for
too, as do the shipping industry and the airlines.

Moreover, there is a simple, direct correlation between wealth and emissions —
more money generally means more flying, driving, boating, and powering of
multiple homes. One case study of German consumers indicates that the travel

habits of the most affluent class have an impact on climate 250 percent greater than

that of their lowest-earning neighbors.

That means any attempt to tax the extraordinary concentration of wealth at the
very top of the economic pyramid, as documented so persuasively by Thomas
Piketty among many others, would — if partially channeled into climate
financing — effectively make the polluters pay. As journalist and climate and
energy policy expert Gar Lipow puts it, "We should tax the rich more because it is
the fair thing to do, and because it will provide a better life for most of us, and a
more prosperous economy. However, providing money to save civilization and
reduce the risk of human extinction is another good reason to bill the rich for their
fair share of taxes." But it must be said that a "polluter pays" principle would have
to reach beyond the super rich. According to Stephen Pacala, director of the
Princeton Environmental Institute and codirector of Princeton's Carbon Mitigation
Initiative, the roughly 500 million richest of us on the planet are responsible for
about half of all global emissions. That would include the rich in every country in
the world, notably in countries like China and India, as well significant parts of the

*48

middle classes in North America and Europe.

Taken together, there is no shortage of options for equitably coming up with the
cash to prepare for the coming storms while radically lowering our emissions to
prevent catastrophic warming.

Consider the following list, by no means complete:

• A "low-rate" financial transaction tax — which would hit trades of stocks,
derivatives, and other financial instruments — could bring in nearly $650 billion
at the global level each year, according to a 201 1 resolution of the European

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Parliament (and it would have the added bonus of slowing down financial

speculation).

• Closing tax havens would yield another windfall. The U.K. -based Tax Justice
Network estimates that in 2010, the private financial wealth of individuals
stowed unreported in tax havens around the globe was somewhere between $21
trillion and $32 trillion. If that money were brought into the light and its earnings
taxed at a 30 percent rate, it would yield at least $190 billion in income tax

, 50

revenue each year.

• A 1 percent "billionaire's tax," floated by the U.N., could raise $46 billion

annually.^

• Slashing the military budgets of each of the top ten military spenders by 25
percent could free up another $325 billion, using 2012 numbers reported by the
Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. (Granted, probably the

toughest sell of all, particularly in the U.S.)

• A $50 tax per metric ton of CO2 emitted in developed countries would raise an

estimated $450 billion annually, while a more modest $25 carbon tax would still
yield $250 billion per year, according to a 201 1 report by the World Bank, the

International Monetary Fund, and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation

and Development (OECD), among others.

• Phasing out fossil fuel subsidies globally would conservatively save governments

a total $775 billion in a single year, according to a 2012 estimate by Oil Change

International and the Natural Resources Defense Council.

If these various measures were taken together, they would raise more than $2
trillion annually ~ Certainly enough for a very healthy start to finance a Great
Transition (and avoid a Great Depression). And that doesn't count any royalty
increases on fossil fuel extraction. Of course, for any of these tax crackdowns to
work, key governments would have to coordinate their responses so that
corporations had nowhere to hide — a difficult task, though far from impossible,
and one frequently bandied about at G20 summits.

In addition to the simple fact that the money is badly needed, there are practical
political reasons why "polluter pays" should guide climate financing. As we have
seen, responding to the climate crisis can offer real benefits to a majority of people,
but real solutions will also, by definition, require short- and medium-term
sacrifices and inconveniences. And what we know from past sacrifices made in the
name of a crisis — most notably via rationing, conservation, and price controls

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during both world wars — is that success depends entirely on a perception of
fairness.

In Britain and North America during World War II, for instance, every strata of
society was required to make do with less, even the very rich. And in fact, though
overall consumption in the U.K. dropped by 16 percent, caloric intake for the poor
increased during the war, because the rations provided low-income people with
more than they could otherwise afford.~There was plenty of cheating and black
market profiteering, of course, but these programs enjoyed broad-based support
because they were, at least in theory, fair. The theme of equality pervaded
government campaigns about these wartime programs: "Fair Shares for All" was
a key slogan in the U.K, while the U.S. went with "Share and Share Alike" and

"Produce, Conserve, Share and Play Square." An Office of Price
Administration pamphlet from 1942 argued that rationing was part of the
American tradition. "What Is Rationing?" it asked.

First, let's be sure what rationing is not. It is not starvation, long bread lines,
shoddy goods. Rather, it is a community plan for dividing fairly the supplies
we have among all who need them. Second, it is not "un-American." The
earliest settlers of this country, facing scarcities of food and clothing, pooled
their precious supplies and apportioned them out to everyone on an equal
basis. It was an American idea then, and it is an American idea now, to share
and share alike — to sacrifice, when necessary, but sacrifice together, when

the country's welfare demands it.

Governments also made sure that there were very public crackdowns on wealthy
and well-connected individuals who broke the rules, sending the message that no
one was exempt. In the U.K., movie stars, as well as corporations like Woolworth
and Sainsbury, faced prosecution for rations violations. In the United States, cases
were brought against some of the largest corporations in the country. It was no
secret that many large U.S. manufacturers disliked the entire rationing system; they
lobbied against it, because they believed it eroded their brand value. Yet they were

forced to accept it all the same.

This perception of fairness — that one set of rules applies to players big and
small — has been entirely missing from our collective responses to climate change
thus far. For decades, regular people have been asked to turn off their lights, put
on sweaters, and pay premium prices for nontoxic cleaning products and renewable
energy — and then watched as the biggest polluters have been allowed to expand
their emissions without penalty. This has been the pattern ever since President
Jimmy Carter addressed the American public in July 1979 about the fact that "too

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many of us now tend to worship self-indulgence and consumption. Human identity
is no longer defined by what one does, but by what one owns." He urged
Americans "for your good and for your nation's security to take no unnecessary
trips, to use carpools or public transportation whenever you can, to park your car
one extra day per week, to obey the speed limit, and to set your thermostats to save
fuel. Every act of energy conservation like this is more than just common sense —
I tell you it is an act of patriotism."

The address was initially well received but came to be derided as the "malaise"
speech and is frequently cited as one of the reasons Carter lost his reelection bid
to Ronald Reagan. And though he was not talking about climate change but rather
a broad "crisis of confidence" against a backdrop of energy scarcity, the speech is
still invoked as proof that any politician who asks voters to sacrifice to solve an
environmental crisis is on a suicide mission. Indeed this assessment has shaped the
win-win messaging of environmentalists ever since.

So it's interesting to note that the late intellectual Christopher Lasch, who was
one of Carter's key advisors on the infamous speech, was also one of its most
pointed critics. The author ofThe Culture of Narcissism had strongly urged the
president to temper his message of personal austerity with assurances of
fundamental fairness and social justice. As Lasch revealed to an interviewer years
later, he had told Carter to "put a more populist construction in his indictment of
American consumerism.... What was needed was a program that called for
sacrifices all right, but made it clear that the sacrifices would be distributed in an
equitable fashion." And that, Lasch said, "would mean that those most able to
make sacrifices would be the ones on whom the sacrifices fell. That's what I mean
by populism."

We cannot know if the reaction might have differed had Carter listened to that
advice and presented a plan for conservation that began with those pushing and
profiting most from wasteful consumption. We do know that responses to climate
change that continue to put the entire burden on individual consumers are doomed
to fail. For instance, the annual "British Social Attitudes" survey, conducted by the
independent NatCen Social Research, asked a set of questions about climate
policies in the year 2000, and then again in 2010. It found that, "Whereas, 43 per
cent a decade ago said they would be willing to pay higher prices to protect the
environment, this is nowadays only true of 26 per cent. There has been a similar
fall in the proportion prepared to pay higher taxes (3 1 to 22 per cent), but a smaller
decline in relation to cuts in the standard of living (26 per cent to 20 per cent)."~

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These results, and others like them, have been cited as proof that during times
of economic hardship, people's environmental concerns go out the window. But
that is not what these polls prove. Yes, there has been a drop in the willingness of
individuals to bear the financial burden of responding to climate change, but not
simply because economic times are hard. Western governments have responded to
these hard times — which have been created by rampant greed and corruption
among their wealthiest citizens — by asking those least responsible for the current
conditions to bear the burden. After paying for the crisis of the bankers with cuts
to education, health care, and social safety nets, is it any wonder that a beleaguered
public is in no mood to bail out the fossil fuel companies from the crisis that they
not only created but continue to actively worsen?

Most of these surveys, notably, don't ask respondents how they feel about
raising taxes on the rich and removing fossil fuel subsidies, yet these are some of
the most reliably popular policies around. And it's worth noting that a U.S. poll
conducted in 2010 — with the country still reeling from economic crisis — asked
voters whether they would support a plan that "would make oil and coal companies
pay for the pollution they cause. It would encourage the creation of new jobs and
new technologies in cleaner energy like wind, solar, and nuclear power. The
proposal also aims to protect working families, so it refunds almost all of the
money it collects directly to the American people, like a tax refund, and most
families end up better off." The poll found that three quarters of voters, including
the vast majority of Republicans, supported the ideas as outlined, and only 1 1
percent strongly opposed it. The plan was similar to a proposal, known as "cap and
dividend," being floated by a pair of senators at the time, but it was never seriously

considered by the U.S. Senate.

And when, in June 2014, Obama finally introduced plans to use the
Environmental Protection Agency to limit greenhouse gas emissions from existing
power plants, the coal lobby howled with indignation but public opinion was
solidly supportive. According to one poll, 64 percent of Americans, including a
great many Republicans, backed such a policy even though it would likely mean
paying more for energy every month ~

The lesson from all this is not that people won't sacrifice in the face of the
climate crisis. It's that they have had it with our culture of lopsided sacrifice, in
which individuals are asked to pay higher prices for supposedly green choices
while large corporations dodge regulation and not only refuse to change their
behavior, but charge ahead with ever more polluting activities. Witnessing this, it
is perfectly sensible for people to shed much of the keener enthusiasm that marked

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the early days of the climate movement, and to make it clear that no more sacrifice
will be made until the policy solutions on the table are perceived as just. This does
not mean the middle class is off the hook. To fund the kind of social programs that
will make a just transition possible, taxes will have to rise for everyone but the
poor. But if the funds raised go toward social programs and services that reduce
inequality and make lives far less insecure and precarious, then public attitudes
toward taxation would very likely shift as well.

To state the obvious: it would be incredibly difficult to persuade governments in
almost every country in the world to implement the kinds of redistributive climate
mechanisms I have outlined. But we should be clear about the nature of the
challenge: it is not that "we" are broke or that we lack options. It is that our political
class is utterly unwilling to go where the money is (unless it's for a campaign
contribution), and the corporate class is dead set against paying its fair share.

Seen in this light, it's hardly surprising that our leaders have so far failed to act
to avert climate chaos. Indeed even if aggressive "polluter pays" measures were
introduced, it isn't at all clear that the current political class would know what to
do with the money. After all, changing the building blocks of our societies — the
energy that powers our economies, how we move around, the designs of our major
cities — is not about writing a few checks. It requires bold long-term planning at
every level of government, and a willingness to stand up to polluters whose actions
put us all in danger. And that won't happen until the corporate liberation project
that has shaped our political culture for three and a half decades is buried for good.

Just as the climate change deniers I met at the Heartland Institute fear, there is a
direct relationship between breaking fossilized free market rules and making swift
progress on climate change. Which is why, if we are to collectively meet the
enormous challenges of this crisis, a robust social movement will need to demand
(and create) political leadership that is not only committed to making polluters pay
for a climate -ready public sphere, but willing to revive two lost arts: long-term
public planning, and saying no to powerful corporations.

~ This was the situation not only in the Rockaways but seemingly wherever public housing was in the path
of the storm. In Red Hook, Brooklyn, many residents were left without power for three weeks, during which
time the Housing Authority never went systematically door-to-door. As sixty-year-old Wally Bazemore put
it at an angry residents meeting: "We were literally in the dark and we were completely in the dark."

~ This is why the persistent positing of population control as a solution to climate change is a distraction
and moral dead end. As this research makes clear, the most significant cause of rising emissions is not the
reproductive behavior of the poor but the consumer behaviors of the rich.

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PLANNING AND BANNING

Slapping the Invisible Hand, Building a Movement

"Post-modernism has cut off the present from all futures. The daily
media adds to this by cutting off the past. Which means that critical
opinion is often orphaned in the present."

-John Berger, Keeping a Rendezvous, 1991 1

"A reliably green company is one that is required to be green by law."

-Gus Speth, former dean of the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental

Studies, 2008 2

To understand how free market ideology continues to suffocate the potential for
climate action, it's useful to look back on the most recent moment when
transformative change of the scope required actually seemed like a real possibility,
even in the United States. That time was 2009, the peak of the world financial crisis
and the first year of the Obama presidency.

Hindsight is easy, granted, but bear with me: imagining what might have been
can help clarify what the future might still create.

This was a moment when history was unfolding in fast-forward, when almost
anything seemed possible, for better and worse. A large part of what made better
scenarios seem possible was the decisive democratic mandate that Obama had just
earned. He had been elected on a platform promising to rebuild the "Main Street"
economy and to treat climate change as, in his words, "an opportunity, because if
we create a new energy economy, we can create five million new jobs. ... It can be
an engine that drives us into the future the same way the computer was the engine

for economic growth over the last couple of decades." Both the fossil fuel
companies and the environmental movement took it as a given that the new

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president would introduce a bold piece of climate legislation early in his
presidency.

The financial crisis, meanwhile, had just shattered public faith in laissez-faire
economics around the world — so much so that there was tremendous support even
in the U.S. for breaking long-standing ideological taboos against intervening
directly in the market to create good jobs. That gave Obama the leverage to design
a stimulus program worth about $800 billion (and he probably could have asked
for more) to get the economy moving again.

The other extraordinary factor in this moment was the weak state of the banks:
in 2009, they were still on their knees, dependent on trillions in bailout funds and
loan guarantees. And there was a live debate unfolding about how those banks
should be restructured in exchange for all that taxpayer generosity (there was even
serious discussion of nationalization). The other factor worth remembering is that
starting in 2008, two of the Big Three automakers — companies at the very heart of
the fossil fuel economy — had so badly mismanaged their affairs that they too had
landed in the hands of the government, which had been tasked with securing their
viability.

All told, three huge economic engines — the banks, the auto companies, and the
stimulus bill — were in a state of play, placing more economic power in the hands
of Obama and his party than any U.S. government since the administration of
Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Imagine, for a moment, if his administration had been
willing to invoke its newly minted democratic mandate to build the new economy
promised on the campaign trail — to treat the stimulus bill, the broken banks, and
the shattered car companies as the building blocks of that green future. Imagine if
there had been a powerful social movement — a robust coalition of trade unions,
immigrants, students, environmentalists, and everyone else whose dreams were
getting crushed by the crashing economic model — demanding that Obama do no
less.

The stimulus package could have been used to build the best public transit
systems and smart grids in the world. The auto industry could have been
dramatically reengineered so that its factories built the machinery to power that
transition — not just a few token electric cars (though those too) but also vast
streetcar and high-speed rail systems across an underserved nation. Just as a
shuttered auto parts factory in Ontario had reopened as the Silfab solar plant,
similar transitions could have been made in closed and closing factories across the
continent. This transformation was proposed at the time by one of the most

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important intellectuals of the North American labor movement, Sam Gindin, who
served for many years as research director for the Canadian Auto Workers Union:
If we are serious about incorporating environmental needs into the economy,
this means changing everything about how we produce and consume and how
we travel and live. The potential work to be done in this regard — in the tool
and die shops that are closing, the component plants that have the capacity to
make more than a specific component, and by a workforce anxious to do
useful work — is limitless.

The equipment and skills can be used to not only build different cars, and
different car components, but to expand public transit and develop new
transportation systems. They can participate in altering, in line with
environmental demands, the machinery in every workplace and the motors
that run the machinery. They can be applied to new systems of production
that recycle used materials and final products (such as cars). Homes will have
to be retrofitted and appliances modified. The use of solar panels and wind
turbines will spread, new electricity grids will have to be developed, and
urban infrastructure will have to be reinvented to accommodate the changes
in transportation and energy use.

What better time to launch such a project than now, in the face of having
to overcome both the immediate economic crisis and the looming
environmental crisis? And what greater opportunity to insist that we cannot
lose valuable facilities and equipment, nor squander the creativity, knowledge

and abilities of engineers, skilled trades and production workers?

Retrofitting factories on that scale is expensive, to be sure, and that's where the
bailed-out banks could have come in. A government unafraid to use its newfound
power could have used the leverage it had over the banks (having just pulled them
from the precipice) to enlist them — kicking and screaming if necessary — in this
great transformation. As every banker knows, when you loan someone money, you
acquire a fair bit of power over them. Does a factory need some capital to make
the transition from dirty to clean? If it has a credible business plan, especially one
that supports the stimulus vision, then the bailed-out banks could have been
mandated by the state as part of the bailout to give that factory a loan. If one
refused, it could have been nationalized, as several major banks were around the
world in the period.

Many of the previous factory owners would not have been interested in sticking
around for this kind of transition, since the profit margins, at least at first, would
have been small. But that is no reason to allow useful machines to be sold off as

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scrap. The workers at these plants, as Gindin suggested, could have been given the
chance to run their old factories as cooperatives, as happened in several hundred
abandoned factories in Argentina after that country's economic crisis in 2001. I
lived in Buenos Aires for two years while making a documentary film about those
factories, called The Take. One of the stories we told was about a group of workers
who took over their shuttered auto-parts plant and turned it into a thriving co-op.
It was a highly emotional journey, as workers took big risks and discovered new
skills they had not known they possessed. And over a decade later, we still receive
reports about how well things are going at the factory. Most of Argentina's
"recovered factories" — as the hundreds of worker-run co-ops are called — are still
in production, churning out everything from kitchen tiles to men's suits. This
decentralized ownership model has the added benefit of pushing against the trend
toward utterly unsustainable wealth inequality; rather than simply propping up the
current global system in which eighty-five people control as much wealth as half
the world's population, the ability to create wealth is gradually dispersed to the
workers themselves, and the communities sustained by the presence of well-paying
jobsr

If that kind of coherent and sweeping vision had emerged in the United States
in that moment of flux as the Obama presidency began, right-wing attempts to
paint climate action as an economy killer would have fallen flat. It would have
been clear to all that climate action is, in fact, a massive job creator, as well as a
community rebuilder, and a source of hope in moments when hope is a scarce
commodity indeed. But all of this would have required a government that was
unafraid of bold long-term economic planning, as well as social movements that
were able to move masses of people to demand the realization of that kind of
vision. (The mainstream climate organizations in the U.S., in this crucial period,
were instead narrowly focused on a failed attempt to get a piece of carbon-trading
energy legislation through Congress, not on helping to build a broad movement.)

In the absence of those factors, that rarest of historical moments — so pregnant
with potential — slipped away. Obama let the failed banks do what they liked,
despite the fact that their gross mismanagement had put the entire economy at risk.
The fundamentals of the car industry were also left intact, with little more than a
fresh wave of downsizing to show for the crisis. The industry lost nearly 115,000
manufacturing jobs between 2008 and 2014.

To be fair, there was significant support for wind and solar and for green
initiatives like energy efficient building upgrades in the stimulus bill; without
question, as journalist Michael Grunwald shows in The New New Deal, the funding

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amounted to "the biggest and most transformative energy bill in U.S. history." But
public transit was still inexplicably shortchanged and the biggest infrastructure
winner was the national highway system, precisely the wrong direction from a
climate perspective. This failure was not only Obama's; as University of Leeds
ecological economist Julia Steinberger observes, it was global. The financial crisis
that began in 2008 "should have been an opportunity to invest in low-carbon
infrastructure for the 21st century. Instead, we fostered a lose-lose situation:
carbon emissions rocketing to unprecedented levels, alongside increases in

joblessness, energy costs, and income disparities."

What stopped Obama from seizing his historical moment to stabilize the
economy and the climate at the same time was not lack of resources, or a lack of
power. He had plenty of both. What stopped him was the invisible confinement of
a powerful ideology that had convinced him — as it has convinced virtually all of
his political counterparts — that there is something wrong with telling large
corporations how to run their businesses even when they are running them into the
ground, and that there is something sinister, indeed vaguely communist, about
having a plan to build the kind of economy we need, even in the face of an
existential crisis.

This is, of course, yet another legacy bequeathed to us by the free market
counterrevolution. As recently as the early 1970s, a Republican president —
Richard Nixon — was willing to impose wage and price controls to rescue the U.S.
economy from crisis, popularizing the notion that "We are all Keynesians
now." But by the 1980s, the battle of ideas waged out of the same Washington
think tanks that now deny climate change had successfully managed to equate the
very idea of industrial planning with Stalin's five-year plans. Real capitalists don't
plan, these ideological warriors insisted — they unleash the power of the profit
motive and let the market, in its infinite wisdom, create the best possible society
for all.

Obama, obviously, does not share this extreme vision: as his health care and
other social policies suggest, he believes government should nudge business in the
right direction. And yet he is still sufficiently a product of his anti-planning era
that when he had the banks, the auto companies, and the stimulus in his hands, he
saw them as burdens to be rid of as soon as possible, rather than as a rare chance
to build an exciting new future.

If there is a lesson in this tremendous missed opportunity, it is this: if we are
going to see climate action of the scale and speed required, the left is going to have
to quickly learn from the right. Conservatives have managed to stall and roll back

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climate action amidst economic crisis by making climate about economics — about
the pressing need to protect growth and jobs during difficult times (and they are
always difficult). Progressives can easily do the same: by showing that the real
solutions to the climate crisis are also our best hope of building a much more stable
and equitable economic system, one that strengthens and transforms the public
sphere, generates plentiful, dignified work, and radically reins in corporate greed.

But before that can happen, it's clear that a core battle of ideas must be fought
about the right of citizens to democratically determine what kind of economy they
need. Policies that simply try to harness the power of the market — by minimally
taxing or capping carbon and then getting out of the way — won't be enough. If we
are to rise to a challenge that involves altering the very foundation of our economy,
we will need every policy tool in the democratic arsenal.

Planning for Jobs

Some policymakers already understand this, which is why so many of the climate
disputes being dragged in front of WTO tribunals hinge on attempts by
governments, whether in Ontario or India, to reintroduce some measure of
industrial planning to their economies. These governments are saying to industry:
we will support you, but only if you support the communities from which you
profit, by providing well-paying local jobs, and sourcing your products locally.

The reason governments turn to buy-local or hire-local policies such as these is
because they make political sense. Any response to the climate crisis that has a
chance of success will create not just winners but also a significant number of
losers — industries that can no longer exist in their current form and workers whose
jobs will disappear. There is little hope of bringing the fossil fuel companies onside
to a green transition; the profits they stand to lose are simply too great. That is not
the case, however, for the workers whose salaries are currently tied to fossil fuel
extraction and combustion.

What we know is this: trade unions can be counted on to fiercely protect jobs,
however dirty, if these are the only jobs on offer. On the other hand, when workers
in dirty sectors are offered good jobs in clean sectors (like the former autoworkers
at the Silfab factory in Toronto), and are enlisted as active participants in a green
transition, then progress can happen at lightning speed.

The potential job creation is huge. For instance, a plan put forward by the U.S.
BlueGreen Alliance, a body that brings together unions and environmentalists,

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estimated that a $40 billion annual investment in public transit and high-speed rail
for six years would produce more than 3.7 million jobs during that period. And we
know that investments in public transit pay off: a 201 1 study by research and policy
organization Smart Growth America found they create 31 percent more jobs per
dollar than investment in new road and bridge construction. Investing in the
maintenance and repair of roads and bridges creates 16 percent more jobs per dollar

than investment in new road and bridge construction. All of which means that
making existing transportation infrastructure work better for more people is a
smarter investment from both a climate and an economic perspective than covering
more land with asphalt.

Renewable energy is equally promising, in part because it creates more jobs per
unit of energy delivered than fossil fuels. In 2012, the International Labour
Organization estimated that about five million jobs had already been created in the
sector worldwide — and that is with only the most scattershot and inadequate levels
of government commitment to emission reduction.^ If industrial policy were
brought in line with climate science, the supply of energy through wind, solar, and
other forms of renewable energy (geothermal and tidal power, for example) would
generate huge numbers of jobs in every country — in manufacturing, construction,
installation, maintenance, and operation.

Similar research in Canada has found that an investment of $1.3 billion (the
amount the Canadian government spends on subsidies to oil and gas companies)
could create seventeen to twenty thousand jobs in renewable energy, public transit,
or energy efficiency — six to eight times as many jobs as that money generates in
the oil and gas sector. And according to a 201 1 report for the European Transport
Workers Federation, comprehensive policies to reduce emissions in the transport
sector by 80 percent would create seven million new jobs across the continent,
while another five million clean energy jobs in Europe could slash electricity
emissions by 90 percent. A bold coalition in South Africa, meanwhile, going under
the banner of One Million Climate Jobs, is calling for mass job creation programs
in areas ranging from renewable energy to public transit to ecosystem restoration
to small-scale sustainable farming. "By placing the interests of workers and the
poor at the forefront of strategies to combat climate change we can simultaneously
halt climate change and address our jobs bloodbath," the campaign states. 11

These are not, however, the kinds of jobs that the market will create on its own.
They will be created on this scale only by thoughtful policy and planning. And in
some cases, having the tools to make those plans will require citizens doing what
the residents of so many German cities and towns have done: taking back control

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over electricity generation so that the switch to renewables can be made without
delay, while any profits generated go not to shareholders but back into supporting
hungry public services.

And it's not only power generation that should receive this treatment. If the
private companies that took over the national railways are cutting back and eroding
services at a time when the climate crisis demands expanded low-carbon
transportation alternatives to keep more of us out of planes, then these services too
must be reclaimed. And after more than two decades of hard experience with
privatizations — which has too often involved diminished services combined with
higher prices — a great many people are ready to consider that option. For instance,
a British poll released in November 2013 found "voters of all politics united in
their support for nationalisation of energy and rail. 68 per cent of the public say
the energy companies should be run in the public sector, while only 21 per cent
say they should remain in private hands. 66 per cent support nationalising the
railway companies while 23 per cent think they should be run privately." One of
the most surprising aspects of the poll was the amount of support for
nationalization among self-described Conservative voters: 52 percent favored

taking back both the energy companies and the rails.

Planning for Power

The climate case for rethinking private ownership is particularly strong when it
comes to natural gas, which is currently being touted by many governments as a
"bridge fuel." The theory is that, in the time it takes for us to make a full switch to
zero carbon sources of energy, gas can serve as an alternative to dirtier fossil fuels
like coal and oil. It is far from clear that this bridge is necessary, given the speed
of the shift to renewables in countries like Germany. And there are many problems,
as we will see, with the whole idea of natural gas being clean. But from a planning
perspective, the most immediate problem is that for the bridge concept to work,
ways would have to be found to ensure that natural gas was being used only as a
replacement for coal and oil — and not to undercut renewable energy. And this is a
very real concern: in the U.S., the deluge of cheap natural gas thanks to tracking
has already hurt the country's wind market, with wind power's share of the new
electricity coming online plummeting from at least 42 percent in 2009 to 25 percent
in 2010 and 32 percent in 2011 — the key years that fracking

skyrocketed. Moreover, once the "bridge" to a renewable future has been built,

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there would have to be a way to phase out gas extraction completely, since it is a
major emitter of greenhouse gases.

There are various ways to design a system that would meet these specific goals.
Governments could mandate "combined-cycle" plants that are better at ramping
up and down to support wind and solar when available, for example, and they could
firmly link any new gas plants to coal plants taken off the grid. Also crucial, says
the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives' Ben Parfitt, an expert on fracking
impacts, would be "regulations in place at the state and the national levels that
made the link between where the gas is being produced and how it is being
produced, and the ultimate production of the power," meaning that power plants
could only source gas that was proven to have lower life-cycle emissions than

coal. And that could well rule out fracked gas completely. Barriers would also
need to be placed on the ability of companies to export their gas, in order to prevent
it from being burned in countries that place no such restrictions. These measures
would limit many, though by no means all, of the risks associated with natural gas,
but they would also seriously eat into the profitability of the sector.

Which raises the question: why would notoriously ruthless for-profit companies
accept a business model that relies on them not competing with large parts of the
energy sector (wind and solar), requires that they submit to a huge range of costly
regulation, all with the eventual goal of putting themselves out of business? The
answer is that they would not. Treating natural gas as a truly temporary transition
fuel is anathema to the profit-seeking imperative that drives these corporations.
After all, who is doing the fracking? It's companies like BP and Chevron, with
their long track records of safety violations and fending off tough regulation. These
are companies whose business model requires that they replace the oil and gas they
have in production with new reserves of fossil fuels or face a shareholder rebellion.
That same growth-above-all model demands that they occupy as much of the
energy market as possible — which means competing not just with coal but with
every player in the energy market, including vulnerable renewable s. To quote John
Browne when he was chief executive of BP (he now heads the gas giant Cuadrilla):
"Corporations have to be responsive to price signals. We are not public
service." 1 ^ True enough — but that was neither always the case with our energy
companies, nor must it remain so.

The bottom line is simple. No private company in the world wants to put itself
out of business; its goal is to expand its market. Which is why, if natural gas is to
serve as a short-term transition fuel, that transition must be tightly managed by —
and for — the public, so that the profits from current sales are reinvested in

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renewable technologies for the future, and the sector is constrained from indulging
in the kind of exponential growth it is currently enjoying amidst the shale gas
boom.

The solution is most emphatically not energy nationalization on existing models.
The big publicly owned oil companies — from Brazil's Petrobras to Norway's
Statoil to PetroChina — are just as voracious in pursuing high-risk pools of carbon

as their private sector counterparts. And in the absence of a credible transition
plan to harness the profits for a switch to renewable energy, having the state as the
major shareholder in these companies has profoundly corrupting effects, creating
an addiction to easy petrodollars that makes it even less likely that policymakers
will introduce measures that hurt fossil fuel profits in any way. In short, these
centralized monsters are fossils in every sense of the word, and need to be broken
up and phased out whether they are held in public or private hands.

A better model would be a new kind of utility — run democratically, by the
communities that use them, as co-ops or as a "commons," as author and activist

1 8

David B oilier and others have outlined. This kind of structure would enable
citizens to demand far more from their energy companies than they are able to
now — for example, that they direct their profits away from new fossil fuel
exploration and obscene executive compensation and shareholder returns and into
building the network of complementary renewables that we now know has the
potential to power our economies in our lifetimes.

The rapid rise of renewables in Germany makes a powerful case for this model.
The transition has occurred, first of all, within the context of a sweeping, national
feed-in tariff program that includes a mix of incentives designed to ensure that
anyone who wants to get into renewable power generation can do so in a way that
is simple, stable, and profitable. Providers are guaranteed priority access to the
grid, and offered a guaranteed price so the risk of losing money is low.

This has encouraged small, noncorporate players to become renewable energy
providers — farms, municipalities, and hundreds of newly formed co-ops. That has
decentralized not just electrical power, but also political power and wealth: roughly
half of Germany's renewable energy facilities are in the hands of farmers, citizen
groups, and almost nine hundred energy cooperatives. Not only are they generating
power but they also have the chance to generate revenue for their communities by
selling back to the grid. Over all, there are now 1.4 million photovoltaic

installations and about 25,000 windmills. Nearly 400,000 jobs have been created.

Each one of these measures represents a departure from neoliberal orthodoxy:
the government is engaging in long-term national planning; it is deliberately

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picking winners in the market (renewables over nuclear power, which it is
simultaneously closing down); it is fixing prices (a clear market interference); and
creating a fair playing field for any potential renewable energy producer — big or
small — to enter the market. And yet despite — or rather because of — these
ideological heresies, Germany's transition is among the fastest in the world.
According to Hans Thie, the advisor on economic policy for the Left Party in the
German parliament, who has been intensely involved in the transition, "Virtually
all expansion estimates have been surpassed. The speed of expansion is

considerably higher than had been expected."

Nor can this success be dismissed as a one-off. Germany' s program mirrors one
implemented in Denmark in the 1970s and 1980s, which helped switch more than
40 percent of the country's electricity consumption to renewables, mostly wind.
Up to around 2000, roughly 85 percent of Danish wind turbines were owned by
small players like farmers and co-ops. Though large offshore wind operators have
entered the market in recent years, this remains a striking commonality between
Denmark and Germany: it's neither big nationally owned monopolies nor large
corporate- owned wind and solar operators that have the best track record for
spurring renewable energy turnarounds — it's communities, co-ops, and farmers,
working within the context of an ambitious, well-designed national

framework. Though often derided as the impractical fantasy of small-is-beautiful
dreamers, decentralization delivers, and not on a small scale but on the largest scale
of any model attempted thus far, and in highly developed postindustrial nations.

It is also surely no coincidence that Denmark, a deeply social democratic
country, introduced these policies well before it began its halfhearted embrace of
neoliberalism, or that Germany — while prescribing brutal austerity to debtor
countries like Greece and Spain — has never fully followed these prescriptions at
home. These examples make clear that when governments are willing to introduce
bold programs and put goals other than profit making at the forefront of their
policymaking, change can happen with astonishing speed.

Decentralized control over energy is also important for very practical reasons.
There are plenty of examples of large-scale, privately owned renewable energy
projects that fell apart because they were imposed from the outside without local
input or profit sharing. Indeed, when communities are excluded in this way, there
is a very good chance that they will rebel against the noise and "unsightliness" of
wind turbines, or the threats — some real, some imagined — to wildlife and
ecosystems posed by solar arrays. These objections are often dismissed as

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NIMBY-ism (Not in My Backyard) and are used as more evidence of humanity's
tendency toward selfishness and shortsightedness.

But in several regions, these objections have been entirely neutralized with
thoughtful planning. As Preben Maegaard, former president of the World Wind
Energy Association, once put it, "When local people own the wind farms, and
share in the benefits, they will support them. It won't be NIMBY (Not In My Back
Yard), it will be POOL (Please On Our Land)." 23

This is particularly true in times of unending public austerity. "The future is
something that is not relevant at the moment for some people because they're
surviving for the present," Dimitra Spatharidou, a Greek climate change activist
engaged in that country's broader anti-austerity movement, told me. "It's difficult
to understand the concept of sustainability when people are fighting for food and
to have energy to heat their homes." Because of these pressing concerns, her work
is "not about preaching about what happens when climate change hits Greece, it's
about what's happening now and how we can change our economies and our
societies into something better, to something more equitable and to something

fair." For Spatharidou, that has meant showing how community-controlled
renewable energy can be cheaper than dirtier alternatives, and can even be a source
of income when energy is fed back into the grid. It has also meant resisting a
government push to privatize municipal water supplies, pushing instead for
community ownership, an idea with broad support in Greece. The key, she says, is
to offer people something the current system doesn't: the tools and the power to
build a better life for themselves.

This relationship between power decentralization and successful climate action
points to how the planning required by this moment differs markedly from the
more centralized versions of the past. There is a reason, after all, why it was so
easy for the right to vilify state enterprises and national planning: many state-
owned companies were bureaucratic, cumbersome, and unresponsive; the five-
year plans cooked up under state socialist governments were indeed top-down and
remote, utterly disconnected from local needs and experiences, just as the plans
issued by the Communist Party of China's Central Committee are today.

The climate planning we need is of a different sort entirely. There is a clear and
essential role for national plans and policies — to set overall emission targets that
keep each country safely within its carbon budget, and to introduce policies like
the feed-in tariffs employed in Germany, Ontario, and elsewhere, that make
renewable energy affordable. Some programs, like national energy grids and
effective rail services, must be planned, at least in part, at the national level. But if

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these transitions are to happen as quickly as required, then the best way to win
widespread buy-in is for the actual implementation of a great many of the plans to
be as decentralized as possible. Communities should be given new tools and
powers to design the methods that work best for them — much as worker-run co-
ops have the capacity to play a huge role in an industrial transformation. And what
is true for energy and manufacturing can be true for many other sectors: transit
systems accountable to their riders, water systems overseen by their users,
neighborhoods planned democratically by their residents, and so on.

Most critically, farming — a major source of greenhouse gas emissions — can also
become an expanded sector of decentralized self-sufficiency and poverty
reduction, as well as a key tool for emission reduction. Currently, much of the
debate about agriculture and climate change focuses on contrasting the pros and
cons of industrial agriculture versus local and organic farming, with one side
emphasizing higher yields and the other emphasizing lower chemical inputs and
often (though not always) shorter supply lines. Coming up through the middle is
"agroecology," a less understood practice in which small-scale farmers use
sustainable methods based on a combination of modern science and local
knowledge.

Based on the principle that farming should maximize species diversity and
enhance natural systems of soil protection and pest control, agroecology looks
different wherever its holistic techniques are practiced. But a report in National
Geographicprovides a helpful overview of how these principles translate in a few
different contexts: the integration of "trees and shrubs into crop and livestock
fields; solar-powered drip irrigation, which delivers water directly to plant roots;
intercropping, which involves planting two or more crops near each other to
maximize the use of light, water, and nutrients; and the use of green manures,
which are quick- growing plants that help prevent erosion and replace nutrients in

the soil."

These methods and many others maintain healthy soil while producing nutritious
food — more than industrial agriculture does, per unit area — and limit the need for
farmers to buy expensive products like chemical pesticides, fertilizers, and
patented seeds. But many farmers who have long used these methods have realized
that they also have a triple climate benefit: they sequester carbon in the soil, avoid
fossil fuel-based fertilizers, and often use less carbon for transportation to market,
in addition to better withstanding extreme weather and other climate impacts. And
communities that can feed themselves are far less vulnerable to price shocks within
the broader globalized food system. Which is why La Via Campesina, a global

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network of small farmers with 200 million members, often declares, "Agroecology

is the solution to solve the climate crisis." Or "small farmers cool the planet."

In recent years, a phalanx of high-level food experts has come to similar
conclusions. "A large segment of the scientific community now acknowledges the
positive impacts of agroecology on food production, poverty alleviation and
climate change mitigation — and this is what is needed in a world of limited
resources," says Olivier De Schutter, who served as the UN Special Rapporteur on
the Right to Food from 2008 to 2014.-

Just as they dismiss decentralized energy as too small, defenders of Big
Agribusiness maintain that local organic agriculture simply cannot feed a world of
7 billion and growing — but those claims are generally based on comparisons
between yields from industrial, often genetically engineered monocrops, and
organic monocrops. Agroecology is left out of the picture. That's a problem
because as De Schutter notes, "Today's scientific evidence demonstrates that
agroecological methods outperform the use of chemical fertilizers in boosting food
production where the hungry live — especially in unfavorable environments." He
cites the example of Malawi, where a recent turn to agroecology has led to a
doubling or tripling of maize yields in some areas, and adds that "to date,
agroecological projects have shown an average crop yield increase of 80% in 57
developing countries, with an average increase of 116% for all African projects.
Recent projects conducted in 20 African countries demonstrated a doubling of crop

yields over a period of 3-10 years."

All this amounts to a compelling case against the claim, frequently voiced by
powerful philanthropists like Bill Gates, that the developing world, particularly
Africa, needs a "New Green Revolution" — a reference to philanthropic and
government efforts in the mid-twentieth century to introduce industrial agriculture
in Asia and Latin America. "It's often claimed, particularly by those who'd like to
see it rebooted, that the Green Revolution saved the world from hunger,"
sociologist Raj Patel, author of Stuffed and Starved, told me. "The problem is that
even with the Green Revolution, starvation continues — particularly in India, where
the revolution was most intense. Hunger isn't about the amount of food around —
it's about being able to afford and control that food. After all, the U.S. has more

food than it knows what to do with, and still 50 million people are food insecure."

And he adds, "The tragedy here is that there are thousands of successful
experiments, worldwide, showing how climate-smart agriculture can work.
They're characterized not by expensive fertilizer from Yara and proprietary seeds
from Monsanto, but knowledge developed and shared by peasants freely and

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equitably." And, Patel says, "In its finest moments, agroecologygets combined
with 'food sovereignty,' with democratic control of the food system, so that not

only is more food produced, but it' s distributed so that everyone gets to eat it too."^~

About That German Miracle ...

We now have a few models to point to that demonstrate how to get far-reaching
decentralized climate solutions off the ground with remarkable speed, while
fighting poverty, hunger, and joblessness at the same time. But it's also clear that,
however robust, these tools and incentives are not enough to lower emissions in
time. And this brings us to what has most definitelynetf worked about the German
energy transition.

In 2012 — with its renewable sector soaring to new heights — German emissions
actually went up from the previous year. Preliminary data suggest that the same
thing happened in 2013. The country's emissions are still 24 percent below what
they were in 1990, so these two years may turn out to have been a short-term blip,
but the fact that the dramatic rise of renewables is not corresponding to an equally

dramatic drop in greenhouse gas emissions is cause for great concern.^ It also tells
us something critical about the limits of economic plans based on incentives and
market mechanisms alone.

Many have attributed the emissions rise to Germany's decision to phase out
nuclear power, but the facts are not nearly so simple. It's true that in 2011, in the
wake of the Fukushima disaster, the government of Chancellor Angela Merkel —
under intense pressure from the country's powerful antinuclear movement —
announced that it would phase out nuclear power by 2022, and took aggressive
action to begin the process. But at the same time, the government took no similar
action to phase out coal and even allowed coal companies to export power to other
countries. So even though Germans have indeed been moving in ever greater
numbers to renewable energy, coal power continued to grow, with some of it
displacing nuclear power, some of it displacing gas, and some of it being exported.
And much of the coal in Germany is lignite, often referred to as brown coal, a low-

grade variety with particularly high emissions.

As we have already seen, the latest research on renewable energy, most notably
by Mark Jacobson's team at Stanford, shows that a global transition to 100 percent
renewable energy — "wind, water and solar" — is both technically and
economically feasible "by as early as 2030." That means lowering greenhouse

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emissions in line with science-based targets does not have to involve building a
global network of new nuclear plants. In fact that could well slow down the
transition, since renewable energy is faster and cheaper to roll out than nuclear,
critical factors given the tightness of the timeframe. Moreover, says Jacobson, in
the near-term nuclear is "not carbon-free, no matter what the advocates tell you.
Vast amounts of fossil fuels must be burned to mine, transport and enrich uranium
and to build the nuclear plant. And all that dirty power will be released during the
10 to 19 years that it takes to plan and build a nuclear plant. (A wind farm typically
takes two to five years.)" He concludes that "if we invest in nuclear versus true
renewables, you can bet that the glaciers and polar ice caps will keep melting while
we wait, and wait, for the nuclear age to arrive. We will also guarantee a riskier
future for us all." Indeed, renewable installations present dramatically lower risks
than either fossil fuels or nuclear energy to those who live and work next to them.
As comedian Bill Maher once observed, "You know what happens when windmills

*32

collapse into the sea? A splash."^
That said, about 12 percent of the world's power is currently supplied by nuclear

energy, much of it coming from reactors that are old and obsolete. From a climate
perspective, it would certainly be preferable if governments staggered their
transitions away from high-risk energy sources like nuclear,prioritizing fossil fuels
for cuts because the next decade is so critical for getting us off our current
trajectory toward 4-6 degrees Celsius of warming. That would be compatible with
a moratorium on new nuclear facilities, a decommissioning of the oldest plants and
then a full nuclear phase-out once renewables had decisively displaced fossil fuels.

And yet it must also be acknowledged that it was the power of Germany's
antinuclear movement that created the conditions for the renewables revolution in
the first place (as was the case in Denmark in the 1980s), so there might have been
no energy transition to debate without that widespread desire to get off nuclear due
to its many hazards. Moreover, many German energy experts are convinced that
the speed of the transition so far proves that it is possible to phase out both nuclear
and fossil fuels simultaneously. A 2012 report by the German National Center for
Aerospace, Energy and Transport Research (DLR), for instance, demonstrated that
67 percent of the electicity in all of the EU could come from renewables by 2030,

with that number reaching 96 percent by 2050. But, clearly, this will become a
reality only if the right policies are in place.

For that to happen, the German government would have to be willing to do to
the coal industry what it has been willing to do to the nuclear power industry:
introduce specific, top-down regulations to phase it out. Instead, because of the

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vast political power of the German coal lobby, the Merkel government has relied
on the weak market mechanism of carbon trading, through the European emissions

trading system, to try to put negative pressure on coal. When the European carbon
market fell apart, and the price of carbon plummeted, this strategy proved
disastrous. Coal was cheap, there was no real penalty to burning it, and there were
no blocks on exporting coal power, and so key years that should have been
triumphs over pollution became setbacks.

Tadzio Mueller, a Berlin-based researcher and climate expert, put the problem
to me like this: "German emissions are not up because nuclear power is down.
They're up because nobody told the German power companies not to burn coal,
and as long as they can profitably sell the electricity somewhere, they'll burn the
coal — even if most electricity consumed in Germany was renewable. What we

need are strict rules against the extraction and burning of coal. Period."

It is critical for governments to put creative incentives in place so that
communities around the world have tools to say yes to renewable energy. But what
the German experience shows is that all that progress will be put at risk unless
policymakers are willing simultaneously to say no to the ever rapacious fossil fuel
industry.

Remembering How to Say No

Even before I saw the giant mines, when the landscape out the window was still
bright green boggy marshes and lush boreal forest, I could feel them — a catch in
the back of my throat. Then, up and over a small elevation, there they were: the
notorious Alberta tar sands, a parched, gray desert stretching to the horizon.
Mountains of waste so large workers joke that they have their own weather
systems. Tailing ponds so vast they are visible from space. The second largest dam
in the world, built to contain that toxic water. The earth, skinned alive.

Science fiction is rife with fantasies of terraforming — humans traveling to
lifeless planets and engineering them into earthlike habitats. The Canadian tar
sands are the opposite: terra-deforming. Taking a habitable ecosystem, filled with
life, and engineering it into a moonscape where almost nothing can live. And if
this goes on, it could impact an area roughly the size of England. All to access a
semisolid form of "unconventional" oil known as bitumen that is so difficult and
energy-intensive to extract that the process is roughly three to four times as

greenhouse gas intensive as extracting conventional oh:

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In June 2011, I cosigned a letter drafted by author and climate activist Bill
McKibben that called on people to come to Washington, D.C., "in the hottest and
stickiest weeks of the summer" to get arrested protesting the proposed Keystone
XL pipeline. Amazingly, more than 1,200 people did just that, making it the largest

act of civil disobedience in the history of the North American climate movement.

For over a year, a coalition of ranchers and Indigenous people who lived along
the proposed route of the pipeline had been campaigning hard against the project.
But the action in Washington took the campaign national, and turned it into a
flashpoint for a resurgent U.S. climate movement.

The science for singling out Keystone XL was clear enough. The pipeline would
be carrying oil from the Alberta tar sands, and James Hansen, then still working at
NASA, had recently declared that if the bitumen trapped in the tar sands was all

dug up and burned, it would be "game over for the climate." But there was also
some political strategy at work: unlike so many other key climate policies, which
either required approval from Congress or were made at the state level, the decision
about whether to approve the Keystone XL pipeline was up to the State Department
and, ultimately, the president himself, based on whether he determined the project
to be in the "national interest." On this one, Obama would have to give his personal
yes or no, and it seemed to us that there was value in extracting either answer.

If he said no, that would be a much needed victory on which to build at a time
when the U.S. climate movement, bruised from the failure to get energy legislation
through Congress, badly needed some good news. If he said yes, well, that too
would be clarifying. Climate activists, almost all of whom had worked to get
Obama elected, would have to finally abandon the hopes they had pinned on the
young senator who had proclaimed that his election would be remembered as "the
moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to

heal." Letting go of that faith would be disillusioning for many, but at least tactics
could be adjusted accordingly. And it seemed we would not have to wait long for
a verdict: the president would be in a position to make his decision by early
September, which is why the civil disobedience was called for the end of August.

It never occurred to us in those early strategy sessions at 350.org , the climate
organization that McKibben cofounded and where I am a board member, that three
years later we would still be waiting for the president's yes or no. Three years
during which Obama waffled and procrastinated, while his administration ordered
more environmental reviews, then reviews of those reviews, then reviews of those
too.

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A great deal of intellectual energy has been expended trying to interpret the
president's mixed signals on Keystone XL — at times he seemed to be sending a
clear message that he was going to give his approval, as when he arranged for a
photo op in front of a raft of metal pipeline waiting to be laid down; other times he
seemed to be suggesting that he was leaning toward rejection, as when he declared,
in one of his more impassioned speeches about climate change, that Keystone
would be approved "only if this project does not significantly exacerbate the

problem of carbon pollution."

But whichever way the decision eventually goes (and one can hope that we will
know the answer by the time you read this), the drawn-out saga made at least one
thing absolutely clear. Like Angela Merkel, Obama has a hell of a hard time saying
no to the fossil fuel industry. And that's a very big problem because to lower
emissions as rapidly and deeply as required, we need to keep large, extremely
profitable pools of carbon in the ground — resources that the fossil fuel companies
are fully intending to extract.

That means our governments are going to have to start putting strict limits on
the industry — limits ranging from saying no to pipelines linked to expanded
extraction, to caps on the amount of carbon corporations can emit, to banning new
coal-fired power plants, to winding down dirty-energy extraction projects like the
Alberta tar sands, to saying no to demands to open up new carbon frontiers (like
the oil trapped under melting Arctic ice).

In the 1960s and 1970s, when a flurry of environmental legislation was passed in
the U.S. and in other major industrial countries, saying no to dirty industry was,
though never easy, an accepted part of the balancing act of government. That is
simply no longer the case, as is evident from the howls of outrage from
Republicans and many Democrats over the mere suggestion that Obama might
reject Keystone XL, a moderate- sized infrastructure project that, by the president's
own admission, would create so few lasting jobs that they represent "a blip relative

to the need." Given how wrenchingly difficult that yes-or-no regulatory decision
proved to be, it should not be at all surprising that broader, more forceful controls
on how much carbon should be extracted and emitted have thus far been entirely
elusive.

Obama' s much-heralded move in June 2014 mandating emission reductions
from power plants was certainly the right direction, but the measures were still
much too timid to bring the U.S. in line with a safe temperature trajectory. As

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author and long-time climate watcher Mark Hertsgaard observed at the time,
"President Obama clearly grasps the urgency of the climatecrisis and has taken
important steps to address it. But it is his historical fate to be in power at a time
when good intentions and important steps are no longer enough.. . . Perhaps all this
places an unfair burden on President Obama. But science does not care about fair,
and leaders inherit the history they inherit." And yet as Hertsgaard acknowledges,
the kind of policies that would be enough "seem preposterous to the political and

„43

economic status quo.

This state of affairs is, of course, yet another legacy of the free market
counterrevolution. In virtually every country, the political class accepts the
premise that it is not the place of government to tell large corporations what they
can and cannot do, even when public health and welfare — indeed the habitability
of our shared home — are clearly at stake. The guiding ethos of light-touch
regulation, and more often of active deregulation, has taken an enormous toll in
every sector, most notably the financial one. It has also blocked commonsense
responses to the climate crisis at every turn — sometimes explicitly, when
regulations that would keep carbon in the ground are rejected outright, but mostly
implicitly, when those kinds of regulations are not even proposed in the first place,
and so-called market solutions are favored for tasks to which they are wholly
unequipped.

It' s true that the market is great at generating technological innovation and, left
to its own devices, R&D departments will continue to come up with
impressive new ways to make solar modules and electrical appliances more
efficient. But at the same time, market forces will also drive new and innovative
ways to get hard-to-reach fossil fuels out of the deep ocean and hard shale — and
those dirty innovations will make the green ones essentially irrelevant from a
climate change perspective.

At the Heartland conference, Cato's Patrick Michaels inadvertently made that
point when he argued that, though he believes climate change is happening, the
real solution is to do nothing and wait for a technological miracle to rain down
from the heavens. "Doing nothing is actually doing something," he proclaimed,
assuring the audience that "technologies of the future" would save the day. His
proof? "Two words: Shale gas.... That's what happens if you allow people to use
their intellect, and their inquisitiveness, and their drive, in order to produce new
energy sources." And of course the Heartland audience cheered earnestly for the
intellectual breakthrough that is hydraulic fracturing (aka tracking) combined with

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horizontal drilling, the technology that has finally allowed the fossil fuel industry

to screw us sideways.

And it's these "unconventional" methods of extracting fossil fuels that are the
strongest argument for forceful regulation. Because one of the greatest
misconceptions in the climate debate is that our society is refusing to change,
protecting a status quo called "business-as-usual." The truth is that there is no
business-as-usual. The energy sector is changing dramatically all the time — but
the vast majority of those changes are taking us in precisely the wrong direction,
toward energy sources with even higher planet-warming emissions than their
conventional versions.

Take fracking. Natural gas's reputation as a clean alternative to coal and oil is
based on emissions measurements from gas extracted through conventional
drilling practices. But in April 2011, a new study by leading scientists at Cornell
University showed that when gas is extracted through fracking, the emissions

picture changes dramatically.

The study found that methane emissions linked to fracked natural gas are at least
30 percent higher than the emissions linked to conventional gas. That's because
the fracking process is leaky — methane leaks at every stage of production,
processing, storage, and distribution. And methane is an extraordinarily dangerous
greenhouse gas, thirty-four times more effective at trapping heat than carbon
dioxide, based on the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change estimates.
According to the Cornell study, this means that fracked gas has a greater
greenhouse gas impact than oil and may well have as much of a warming impact

as coal when the two energy sources are examined over an extended life cycle.

Furthermore, Cornell biogeochemist Robert Howarth, the lead author of the
study, points out that methane is an even more efficient trapper of heat in the first
ten to fifteen years after it is released — indeed it carries a warming potential that
is eighty-six times greater than that of carbon dioxide. And given that we have
reached "decade zero," that matters a great deal. "It is in this shorter time frame
that we risk locking ourselves into very rapid warming," Howarth explains,
especially because huge liquid natural gas export terminals currently planned or
being built in Australia, Canada, and the United States are not being constructed
to function for only the next decade but for closer to the next half century. So, to
put it bluntly, in the key period when we need to be looking for ways to cut our
emissions rapidly, the global gas boom is in the process of constructing a network

of ultra-powerful atmospheric ovens.

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The Cornell study was the first peer-reviewed research on the greenhouse gas
footprint of shale production, including from methane emissions, and its lead
author was quick to volunteer that his data were inadequate (largely due to the
industry's lack of transparency). Still, the study was a bombshell, and though it
remains controversial, a steady stream of newer work has bolstered the case for a

*48

high rate of methane leakage in the fracking process.

The gas industry isn't the only one turning to dirtier, higher -risk methods. Like
Germany, the Czech Republic and Poland are increasingly relying on and

expanding production of extra-dirty lignite coal. And the major oil companies
are rushing into various tar sands deposits, most notably in Alberta, all with
significantly higher carbon footprints than conventional oil. They are also moving
into ever deeper and icier waters for offshore drilling, carrying the risk of not just
more catastrophic spills, as we saw with BP's Deepwater Horizon disaster, but
spills that are simply impossible to clean up. Increasingly, these extreme extraction
methods — blasting oil and gas out of rock, steaming oil out of tarlike dirt — are
being used together, as when fracked natural gas is piped in to superheat the water
that melts the bitumen in the tar sands, to cite just one example from the energy
death spiral. What industry calls innovation, in other words, looks more like the
final suicidal throes of addiction. We are blasting the bedrock of our continents,
pumping our water with toxins, lopping off mountaintops, scraping off boreal
forests, endangering the deep ocean, and scrambling to exploit the melting
Arctic — all to get at the last drops and the final rocks. Yes, some very advanced
technology is making this possible, but it's not innovation, it's madness.

The fact that fossil fuel companies have been permitted to charge into
unconventional fossil fuel extraction over the past decade was not inevitable, but
rather the result of very deliberate regulatory decisions — decisions to grant these
companies permits for massive new tar sands and coal mines; to open vast swaths
of the United States to natural gas fracking, virtually free from regulation and
oversight; to open up new stretches of territorial waters and lift existing
moratoriums on offshore drilling. These various decisions are a huge part of what
is locking us into disastrous levels of planetary warming. These decisions, in turn,
are the product of intense lobbying by the fossil fuel industry, motivated by the
most powerful driver of them all: the will to survive.

As a rule, extracting and refining unconventional energy is a far more expensive
and involved industrial process than doing the same for conventional fuels. So, for
instance, Imperial Oil (of which Exxon owns a majority share) sank about $13
billion to open the sprawling Kearl open-pit mine in the Alberta tar sands. At two

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hundred square kilometers, it will be one of the largest open-pit mines in Canada,
more than three times the size of Manhattan. And it is only a fraction of the new
construction planned for the tar sands: the Conference Board of Canada projects
that a total of $364 billion will be invested through 2035 ~

In Brazil, meanwhile, Britain's BG Group is expected to make a $30 billion
investment over the next decade, much of it going into ultra-deepwater "subsalt"
projects in which oil is extracted from depths of approximately three thousand
meters (ten thousand feet). But the prize for fossil fuel lock-in surely goes to
Chevron, which is spending a projected $54 billion on a gas development on
Barrow Island, a "Class A Nature Reserve" off the northwest coast of Australia.
The project will release so much natural gas from the earth that it is appropriately
named Gorgon, after the terrifying, snake-haired female monster of Greek
mythology. One of Chevron's partners in the project is Shell, which is reportedly
spending an additional $10-12 billion to build the largest floating offshore facility
ever constructed (longer than four soccer fields) in order to extract natural gas from
a different location off the northwest coast of Australia.

These investments won't be recouped unless the companies that made them are
able to keep extracting for decades, since the up-front costs are amortized over the
life of the projects. Chevron's Australia project is expected to keep producing
natural gas for at least thirty years, while Shell's floating gas monstrosity is built
to function on that site for up to twenty-five years. Exxon's Alberta mine is
projected to operate for forty years, as is BP/Husky Energy's enormous Sunrise
project, also in the tar sands. This is only a small sampling of mega-investments
taking place around the world in the frantic scramble for hard-to-extract oil, gas,
and coal. The long time frames attached to all these projects tell us something
critical about the assumptions under which the fossil fuel industry is working: it is
betting that governments are not going to get serious about emissions cuts for the
next twenty-five to forty years. And yet climate experts tell us that if we want to
have a shot at keeping warming below 2 degrees Celsius, then developed country
economies need to have begun their energy turnaround by the end of this decade

and to be almost completely weaned from fossil fuels before 2050.

If the companies have miscalculated and we do get serious about leaving carbon
in the ground, these huge projects will become what is known as "stranded
assets" — investments that lose their projected value as a result of, for example,
dramatic changes in environmental policy. When a company has a great deal of
expensive stranded assets on its books, the stock market takes notice, and responds
by bidding down the share price of the company that made these bad bets.

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This problem goes well beyond a few specific projects and is integrated into the
way that the market assigns value to companies that are in the business of
extracting finite resources from the earth. In order for the value of these companies
to remain stable or grow, oil and gas companies must always be able to prove to
their shareholders that they have fresh carbon reserves to exploit after they exhaust
those currently in production. This process is as crucial for extractive companies
as it is for a company that sells cars or clothing to show their shareholders that they
have preorders for their future products. At minimum, an energy company is
expected to have as much oil and gas in its proven reserves as it does in current
production, which would give it a "reserve-replacement ratio" of 100 percent. As
the popular site Investopedia explains, "A company's reserve replacement ratio
must be at least 100% for the company to stay in business long-term; otherwise, it

will eventually run out of oil."

Which is why investors tend to get quite alarmed when the ratio drops below
that level. For instance, in 2009, on the same day that Shell announced that its
reserve-replacement ratio for the previous year had ominously dipped to 95
percent, the company scrambled to reassure the market that it was not in trouble.
It did this, tellingly, by declaring that it would cease new investments in wind and
solar energy. At the same time, it doubled down on a strategy of adding new
reserves from shale gas (accessible only through fracking), deepwater oil, and tar
sands. All in all, Shell managed that year to add a record 3.4 billion barrels of oil
equivalent in new proven reserves — nearly three times its production in 2009, or a

reserve-replacement ratio of 288 percent. Its stock price went up accordingly.

For a fossil fuel major, keeping up its reserve-replacement ratio is an economic
imperative; without it, the company has no future. It has to keep moving just to
stand still. And it is this structural imperative that is pushing the industry into the
most extreme forms of dirty energy; there are simply not enough conventional
deposits left to keep up the replacement ratios. According to the International
Energy Agency's annual World Energy Outlook report, global conventional oil
production from "existing fields" will drop from 68 million barrels per day in 2012
to an expected 27 million in 2035.

That means that an oil company looking to reassure shareholders that it has a
plan for what to do, say, when the oil in Alaska's Prudhoe Bay runs out, will be
forced to go into higher-risk, dirtier territories. It is telling, for instance, that more
than half 'of the reserves Exxon added in 2011 come from a single oil project: the
massive Kearl mine being developed in the Alberta tar sands. This imperative
also means that, so long as this business model is in place, no coastline or aquifer

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will be safe. Every victory against the fossil fuel companies, no matter how hard
won, will be temporary, just waiting to be overtaken with howls of "Drill, Baby,
Drill." It won't be enough even when we can walk across the Gulf of Mexico on
the oil rigs, or when Australia's Great Barrier Reef is a parking lot for coal tankers,
or when Greenland's melting ice sheet is stained black from a spill we have no
idea how to clean up. Because these companies will always need more reserves to
top up their replacement ratios, year after year after year.

From the perspective of a fossil fuel company, going after these high-risk carbon
deposits is not a matter of choice — it is its fiduciary responsibility to shareholders,
who insist on earning the same kinds of mega-profits next year as they did this
year and last year. And yet fulfilling that fiduciary responsibility virtually
guarantees that the planet will cook.

This is not hyperbole. In 201 1, a think tank in London called the Carbon Tracker
Initiative conducted a breakthrough study that added together the reserves claimed
by all the fossil fuel companies, private and state-owned. It found that the oil, gas,
and coal to which these players had already laid claim — deposits they have on their
books and which were already making money for shareholders — represented 2,795
gigatons of carbon (a gigaton is 1 billion metric tons). That's a very big problem
because we know roughly how much carbon can be burned between now and 2050
and still leave us a solid chance (roughly 80 percent) of keeping warming below 2
degrees Celsius. According to one highly credible study, that amount of carbon is
565 gigatons between 2011 and 2049. And as Bill McKibben points out, "The
thing to notice is, 2,795 is five times 565. It's not even close." He adds: "What
those numbers mean is quite simple. This industry has announced, in filings to the
SEC and in promises to shareholders, that they're determined to burn five times

more fossil fuel than the planet's atmosphere can begin to absorb."

Those numbers also tell us that the very thing we must do to avert catastrophe —
stop digging — is the very thing these companies cannot contemplate without
initiating their own demise. They tell us that getting serious about climate change,
which means cutting our emissions radically, is simply not compatible with the
continued existence of one of the most profitable industries in the world.

And the amounts of money at stake are huge. The total amount of carbon in
reserve represents roughly $27 trillion — more than ten times the annual GDP of
the United Kingdom. If we were serious about keeping warming below 2 degrees,
approximately 80 percent of that would be useless, stranded assets. Given these
stakes, it is no mystery why the fossil fuel companies fight furiously to block every

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piece of legislation that would point us in the right emissions direction, and why

some directly fund the climate change denier movement.

It also helps that these companies are so profitable that they have money not just
to burn, but to bribe — especially when that bribery is legal. In 2013 in the United
States alone, the oil and gas industry spent just under $400,000 a day lobbying
Congress and government officials, and the industry doled out a record $73 million
in federal campaign and political donations during the 2012 election cycle, an 87

percent jump from the 2008 elections.

In Canada, corporations are not required to disclose how much money they
spend on lobbying, but the number of times they communicate with public officials
is a matter of public record. A 2012 report found that a single industry
organization — the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers — spoke with
federal government officials 536 times between 2008 and 2012, while
TransCanada, the company behind the Keystone XL pipeline, had 279
communications. The Climate Action Network, on the other hand, the country's
broadest coalition devoted to emission reductions, only logged six
communications in the same period. In the U.K., the energy industry met with the
Department of Energy and Climate Change roughly eleven times more frequently
than green groups did during David Cameron's first year in office. In fact, it has
become increasingly difficult to discern where the oil and gas industry ends and
the British government begins. As The Guardian reported in 2011, "At least 50
employees of companies including EDF Energy, npower and Centrica have been
placed within government to work on energy issues in the past four years.. . . The
staff are provided free of charge and work within the departments for secondments
or up to two years.

What all this money and access means is that every time the climate crisis
rightfully triggers our collective self-preservation instinct, the incredible monetary
power of the fossil fuel industry — driven by its own, more immediate self-
preservation instinct — gets in the way. Environmentalists often speak about
contemporary humanity as the proverbial frog in a pot ofboiling water, too
accustomed to the gradual increases in heat to jump to safety. But the truth is that
humanity has tried to jump quite a few times. In Rio in 1992. In Kyoto in 1997. In
2006 and 2007, when global concern rose yet again after the release of An
Inconvenient Truth and with the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to Al Gore and
the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. In 2009, in the lead up to the
United Nations climate summit in Copenhagen. The problem is that the money that

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perverts the political process acts as a kind of lid, intercepting that survival instinct
and keeping us all in the pot.

The influence wielded by the fossil fuel lobby goes a long way toward
explaining why the sector is so very unconcerned about the nonbinding
commitments made by politicians at U.N. climate summits to keep temperatures
below 2 degrees Celsius. Indeed the day the Copenhagen summit concluded —
when the target was made official — the share prices of some of the largest fossil
fuel companies hardly reacted at all.~

Clearly, intelligent investors had determined that the promises governments
made in that forum were nothing to worry about — that they were not nearly as
important as the actions of their powerful energy departments back home that grant
mining and drilling permits. Indeed in March 2014, ExxonMobil confirmed as
much when the company came under pressure from activist shareholders to
respond to reports that much of its reserves would become stranded assets if
governments kept promises to keep warming below 2 degrees by passing
aggressive climate legislation. The company explained that it had determined that
restrictive climate policies were "highly unlikely" and, "based on this analysis, we
are confident that none of our hydrocarbon reserves are now or will become
'stranded.' ,M

Those working inside government understand these dynamics all too well. John
Ashton, who served as special representative for climate change to three successive
U.K. governments between 2006 and 2012, told me that he would often point out
to his colleagues making energy policy that their approach to the development of
fossil fuels contradicted the government's claim to be "running a 2 degree climate
policy." But when he did, they "simply ignored my efforts and carried on as
before — I might as well have been speaking in Attic Greek." From this Ashton
concluded, "In government it is usually easy to rectify a slight misalignment
between two policies but near impossible to resolve a complete contradiction.
Where there is a contradiction, the forces of incumbency start with a massive
advantage."^

This dynamic will shift only when the power (and wealth) of the fossil fuel
industry is seriously eroded. Which is very tough to do: the handy thing about
selling natural resources upon which entire economies have been built — and about
having so far succeeded in blocking policies that would offer real alternatives — is
that most people keep having to buy your products whether they like you or not.
So since these companies are going to continue being rich for the foreseeable

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future, the best hope of breaking the political deadlock is to radically restrict their
ability to spend their profits buying, and bullying, politicians.

The good news for the climate movement is that there are a whole lot of other
sectors that also have an active interest in curtailing the influence of money over
politics, particularly in the U.S., the country that has been the most significant
barrier to climate progress. After all, climate action has failed on Capitol Hill for
the same reasons that serious financial sector reform didn't pass after the 2008
meltdown and the same reasons gun reform didn't pass after the horrific 2012
school shooting in Newtown, Connecticut. Which in turn are the same reasons why
Obama's health reform failed to take on the perverting influence of the medical
insurance and pharmaceutical companies. All these attempts to fix glaring and
fundamental flaws in the system have failed because large corporations wield far
too much political power — a power exerted through corporate campaign
contributions, many of them secret; through almost unfettered access to regulators
via their lobbyists; through the notorious revolving door between business and
government; as well as through the "free speech" rights these corporations have
been granted by the U.S. Supreme Court. And though U.S. politics are particularly
far gone in this regard, no Western democracy has a level playing field when it
comes to political access and power.

Because these distortions have been in place for so long — and harm so many
diverse constituencies — a great many smart people have done a huge amount of
thinking about what it would take to clean up the system. As with responses to
climate change, the problem is not an absence of "solutions" — the solutions are
clear. Politicians must be prohibited from receiving donations from the industries
they regulate, or from acceptingjobs in lieu of bribes; political donations need to
be both fully disclosed and tightly capped; campaigns must be given the right to
access the public airwaves; and, ideally, elections should be publicly funded as a
basic cost of having a democracy.

Yet among large sections of the public, a sense of fatalism pervades: how can
you convince politicians to vote for reforms designed to free them from the binds
of corporate influence when those binds are still tightly in place? It's tough, to be
sure, but the only thing politicians fear more than losing donations is losing
elections. And this is where the power of climate change — and its potential for
building the largest possible political tent — comes into play. As we have seen, the
scientific warnings that we are running out of time to avert climate disaster are
coming from a galaxy of credible scientific organizations and establishment
international agencies — from the American Association for the Advancement of

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Science to NASA to Britain's Royal Society to the Intergovernmental Panel on
Climate Change to the U.S. National Academy of Sciences to the World Bank to
the International Energy Agency. A resurgent climate movement could use those
warnings to light a fire under the call to kick corporate money out of politics — not
just fossil fuel money, but money from all the deep-pocketed barriers to progress
from the National Rifle Association to the fast food industry to the private-prison
complex. Such a rallying cry could bring together all of the various constituencies
that would benefit from reducing corporate power over politics — from health care
workers to parents worried about their children's safety at school. There are no
guarantees that this coalition could succeed where other attempts at similar reforms
have failed. But it certainly seems worth expending at least as much energy and
money as the U.S. climate movement did trying, unsuccessfully, to push through
climate legislation that it knew was wholly inadequate, precisely because it was
written to try to neutralize opposition from fossil fuel companies (more on that
later).

Not an "Issue," a Frame

The link between challenging corruption and lowering emissions is just one
example of how the climate emergency could — by virtue of its urgency and the
fact that it impacts, well, everyone on earth — breathe new life into a political goal
for which there is already a great deal of public support. The same holds true for
many of the other issues discussed so far — from raising taxes on the rich to
blocking harmful new trade deals to reinvesting in the public sphere. But before
those kinds of alliances can be built, some very bad habits will need to be
abandoned.

Environmentalists have a long history of behaving as if no issue is more
important than the Big One — why, some wonder (too often out loud), is everyone
wasting their time worrying about women's rights and poverty and wars when it's
blindingly obvious that none of this matters if the planet decides to start ejecting
us for poor behavior? When the first Earth Day was declared in 1970, one of the
movement's leaders, Democratic senator Gaylord Nelson, declared that the
environmental crisis made "Vietnam, nuclear war, hunger, decaying cities, and all
other major problems one could name . . . relatively insignificant by comparison."
Which helps explains why the great radical journalist I. F. Stone described Earth
Day as "a gigantic snowjob" that was using "rock and roll, idealism and

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noninflammatory social issues to turn the youth off from more urgent concerns

which might really threaten our power structure."

They were both wrong. The environmental crisis — if conceived sufficiently
broadly — neither trumps nor distracts from our most pressing political and
economic causes: it supercharges each one of them with existential urgency. As
Yotam Marom, an organizer with Occupy Wall Street in New York, wrote in July
2013, "The fight for the climate isn't a separate movement, it's both a challenge
and an opportunity for all of our movements. We don't need to become climate
activists, we are climate activists. We don't need a separate climate movement; we
need to seize the climate moment. "~~ The nature of the moment is familiar but bears
repeating: whether or not industrialized countries begin deeply cutting our
emissions this decade will determine whether we can expect the same from rapidly
developing nations like China and India next decade. That, in turn, will determine
whether or not humanity can stay within a collective carbon budget that will give
us a decent chance of keeping warming below levels that our own governments
have agreed are unacceptably dangerous. In other words, we don't have another
couple of decades to talk about the changes we want while being satisfied with the
occasional incremental victory. This set of hard facts calls for strategy, clear
deadlines, dogged focus — all of which are sorely missing from most progressive
movements at the moment.

Even more importantly, the climate moment offers an overarching narrative in
which everything from the fight for good jobs to justice for migrants to reparations
for historical wrongs like slavery and colonialism can all become part of the grand
project of building a nontoxic, shockproof economy before it's too late.

And it is also worth remembering because it's so very easy to forget: the
alternative to such a project is not the status quo extended indefinitely. It is climate-
change-fueled disaster capitalism — profiteering disguised as emission reduction,
privatized hyper- militarized borders, and, quite possibly, high-risk geoengineering
when things spiral out of control.

So how realistic is it to imagine that the climate crisis could be a political game
changer, a unifier for all these disparate issues and movements? Well, there is a
reason hard-right conservatives are putting so much effort into denying its
existence. Their political project is not, after all, as sturdy as it was in 1988, when
climate change first pierced public consciousness. Free market ideology may still
bind the imaginations of our elites, but for most of the general public, it has been
drained of its powers to persuade. The disastrous track record of the past three
decades of neoliberal policy is simply too apparent. Each new blast of statistics

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about how a tiny band of global oligarchs controls half the world's wealth exposes
the policies of privatization and deregulation for the thinly veiled license to steal
that they always were. Each new report of factory fires in Bangladesh, soaring
pollution in China, and water cut-offs in Detroit reminds us that free trade was
exactly the race to the bottom that so many warned it would be. And each news
story about an Italian or Greek pensioner who took his or her own life rather than
try to survive under another round of austerity is a reminder of how many lives
continue to be sacrificed for the few.

The failure of deregulated capitalism to deliver on its promises is why, since
2009, public squares around the world have turned into rotating semipermanent
encampments of the angry and dispossessed. It's also why there are now more calls
for fundamental change than at any point since the 1960s. It's why a challenging
book like Thomas Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century, exposing the
built-in structures of ever-increasingwealth concentration, can sit atop bestseller
lists for months, and why when comedian and social commentator Russell Brand
went on the BBC and called for "revolution," his appearance attracted more than
ten million YouTube views.

Climate change pits what the planet needs to maintain stability against what our
economic model needs to sustain itself. But since that economic model is failing
the vast majority of the people on the planet on multiple fronts that might not be
such a bad thing. Put another way, if there has ever been a moment to advance a
plan to heal the planet that also heals our broken economies and our shattered
communities, this is it.

Al Gore called climate change "an inconvenient truth," which he defined as an
inescapable fact that we would prefer to ignore. Yet the truth about climate change
is inconvenient only if we are satisfied with the status quo except for the small
matter of warming temperatures. If, however, we see the need for transformation
quite apart from those warming temperatures, then the fact that our current road is
headed toward a cliff is, in an odd way, convenient — because it tells us that we had
better start making that sweeping turn, and fast.

Not surprisingly, the people who understand this best are those whom our
economic model has always been willing to sacrifice. The environmental justice
movement, the loose network of groups working with communities on the toxic
front lines of extractive industries — next to refineries, for instance, or downstream
from mines — has always argued that a robust response to emission reduction could
form the basis of a transformative economic project. In fact the slogan long

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embraced by this movement has been "System Change, Not Climate Change" — a

recognition that these are the two choices we face.

"The climate justice fight here in the U.S. and around the world is not just a fight
against the [biggest] ecological crisis of all time," Miya Yoshitani, executive
director of the Oakland-based Asian Pacific Environmental Network (APEN),
explains. "It is the fight for a new economy, a new energy system, a new
democracy, a new relationship to the planet and to each other, for land, water, and
food sovereignty, for Indigenous rights, for human rights and dignity for all people.
When climate justice wins we win the world that we want. We can't sit this one
out, not because we have too much to lose but because we have too much to
gain.... We are bound together in this battle, not just for a reduction in the parts
per million of CO2, but to transform our economies and rebuild a world that we

1 „68

want today.

This is what many liberal commentators get wrong when they assume that
climate action is futile because it asks us to sacrifice in the name of far-off benefits.
"How can you persuade the human race to put the future ahead of the present?"

askedObserver columnist Nick Cohen despondently. The answer is that you
don't. You point out, as Yoshitani does, that for a great many people, climate
action is their best hope for a better present, and a future far more exciting than
anything else currently on offer.

Yoshitani is part of a vibrant activist scene in the San Francisco Bay Area that
is ground zero of the green jobs movement most prominently championed by
former Obama advisor Van Jones. When I first met Yoshitani, the Asian Pacific
Environmental Network was working closely with Asian immigrants in Oakland
to demand affordable housing close to a mass transit station to make sure that
gentrification didn't displace the people who actually use subways and buses. And
APEN has also been part of an initiative to help create worker co-ops in the solar
energy sector in nearby Richmond, so that there are jobs on offer other than the
ones at the local Chevron oil refinery.

More such connections between climate action and economic justice are being
made all the time. As we will see, communities trying to stop dangerous oil
pipelines or natural gas fracking are building powerful new alliances with
Indigenous peoples whose territories are also at risk from these activities. And
several large environmental organizations in the U.S. — including Greenpeace, the
Sierra Club, the BlueGreen Alliance, and 350.org — took stands in support of
demands for comprehensive reform of the U.S. immigration system, in part
because migration is increasingly linked to climate and also because members of

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immigrant communities are often prevented from defending themselves against
heightened environmental risks since doing so could lead to incarceration or

deportation.

These are encouraging signs, and there are plenty of others. Yet the kind of
counter-power that has a chance of changing society on anything close to the scale
required is still missing. It is a painful irony that while the right is forever casting
climate change as a left-wing plot, most leftists and liberals are still averting their
eyes, having yet to grasp that climate science has handed them the most powerful
argument against unfettered capitalism since William Blake's "dark Satanic Mills"
blackened England's skies (which, incidentally, was the beginning of climate
change). By all rights, this reality should be filling progressive sails with
conviction, lending new confidence to the demands for a more just economic
model. And yet when demonstrators are protesting the various failures of this
system in Athens, Madrid, Istanbul, and New York, climate change is too often

little more than a footnote when it could be the coup de grace.

The mainstream environmental movement, meanwhile, generally stands apart
from these expressions of mass frustration, choosing to define climate activism
narrowly — demanding a carbon tax, say, or even trying to stop a pipeline. And
those campaigns are important. But building a mass movement that has a chance
of taking on the corporate forces arrayed against science-based emission reduction
will require the broadest possible spectrum of allies. That would include the public
sector workers — firefighters, nurses, teachers, garbage collectors — fighting to
protect the services and infrastructure that will be our best protection against
climate change. It would include antipoverty activists trying to protect affordable
housing in downtown cores, rather than allowing low-income people to be pushed
by gentrification into sprawling peripheries that require more driving. As Colin
Miller of Oakland-based Bay Localize told me, "Housing is a climate issue." And
it would include transit riders fighting against fare increases at a time when we
should be doing everything possible to make subways and buses more comfortable
and affordable for all. Indeed when masses of people take to the streets to stop such
fare hikes and demand free public transit — as they did in Brazil in June and July
of 2013 — these actions should be welcomed as part of a global effort to fight
climate chaos, even if those populist movements never once use the words "climate

change." Perhaps it should be no surprise that a sustained and populist climate
movement has not yet emerged — a movement like that has yet to be sustained to
counter any of the other failures of this economic model. Yes, there have been
periods when mass outrage in the face of austerity, corruption, and inequality has

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spilled into the streets and the squares for weeks and months on end. Yet if the
recent years of rapid-fire rebellions havedemonstrated anything, it is that these
movements are snuffed out far too quickly, whether by repression or political
cooptation, while the structures they opposed reconstitute themselves in more
terrifying and dangerous forms. Witness Egypt. Or the inequalities that have grown
even more obscene since the 2008 economic crisis, despite the many movements
that rose up to resist the bailouts and austerity measures.

I have, in the past, strongly defended the right of young movements to their
amorphous structures — whether that means rejecting identifiable leadership or
eschewing programmatic demands. And there is no question that old political
habits and structures must be reinvented to reflect new realities, as well as past
failures. But I confess that the last five years immersed in climate science has left
me impatient. As many are coming to realize, the fetish for structurelessness, the
rebellion against any kind of institutionalization, is not a luxury today's
transformative movements can afford.

The core of the problem comes back to the same inescapable fact that has both
blocked climate action and accelerated emissions: all of us are living in the world
that neoliberalism built, even if we happen to be critics of neoliberalism.

In practice that means that, despite endless griping, tweeting, flash mobbing, and
occupying, we collectively lack many of the tools that built and sustained the
transformative movements of the past. Our public institutions are disintegrating,
while the institutions of the traditional left — progressive political parties, strong
unions, membership-based community service organizations — are fighting for
their lives.

And the challenge goes deeper than a lack of institutional tools and reaches into
our very selves. Contemporary capitalism has not just accelerated the behaviors
that are changing the climate. This economic model has changed a great many of
us as individuals, accelerated and uprooted and dematerialized us as surely as it
has finance capital, leaving us at once everywhere and nowhere. These are the
hand-wringing cliches of our time — What is Twitter doing to my attention span?
What are screens doing to our relationships? — but the preoccupations have
particular relevance to the way we relate to the climate challenge.

Because this is a crisis that is, by its nature, slow moving and intensely place
based. In its early stages, and in between the wrenching disasters, climate is about
an early blooming of a particular flower, an unusually thin layer of ice on a lake,
the late arrival of a migratory bird — noticing these small changes requires the kind
of communion that comes from knowing a place deeply, not just as scenery but

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also as sustenance, and when local knowledge is passed on with a sense of sacred
trust from one generation to the next. How many of us still live like that? Similarly,
climate change is also about the inescapable impact of the actions of past
generations not just on the present, but on generations in the future. These time
frames are a language that has become foreign to a great many of us. Indeed
Western culture has worked very hard to erase Indigenous cosmologies that call
on the past and the future to interrogate present-day actions, with long-dead
ancestors always present, alongside the generations yet to come.

In short: more bad timing. Just when we needed to slow down and notice the
subtle changes in the natural world that are telling us that something is seriously
amiss, we have sped up; just when we needed longer time horizons to see how the
actions of our past impact the prospects for our future, we entered into the never-
ending feed of the perpetual now, slicing and dicing our attention spans as never
before.

To understand how we got to this place of profound disconnection from our
surroundings and one another, and to think about how we might build a politics
based on reconnection, we will need to go back a good deal further than 1988.
Because the truth is that, while contemporary, hyper-globalized capitalism has
exacerbated the climate crisis, it did not create it. We started treating the
atmosphere as our waste dump when we began using coal on a commercial scale
in the late 1700s and engaged in similarly reckless ecological practices well before
that.

Moreover, humans have behaved in this shortsighted way not only under
capitalist systems, but under systems that called themselves socialist as well
(whether they were or not remains a subject of debate). Indeed the roots of the
climate crisis date back to core civilizational myths on which post-Enlightenment
Western culture is founded — myths about humanity's duty to dominate a natural
world that is believed to be at once limitless and entirely controllable. This is not
a problem that can be blamed on the political right or on the United States; these
are powerful cultural narratives that transcend geography and ideological divides.

I have, so far, emphasized the familiarity of many of the deep solutions to the
climate crisis and there is real comfort to take from that. It means that in many of
our key responses, we would not be embarking on this tremendous project from
scratch but rather drawing on more than a century of progressive work. But truly
rising to the climate challenge — particularly its challenge to economic growth —
will require that we dig even deeper into our past, and move into some distinctly
uncharted political territory.

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~ Workers in the U.S. and Europe have attempted to emulate this model in recent years during several plant
closures, most notably the high-profile Republic Windows and Doors factory in Chicago, which was shut
down during the economic crisis and then occupied by its workers. Today many of those former employees
are now worker-owners at the reborn New Era Windows Cooperative.

~ Much of the support for nuclear power as a solution to global warming is based on the promise of "next
generation" nuclear technologies, which range from more efficient reactors cooled with gas instead of
water, to "fast reactor" designs that can run on spent fuel or "breed" more fuel in addition to consuming
it — or even nuclear fusion, in which atomic nuclei are forced together (as occurs in the sun) rather than
split. Boosters of these groundbreaking technologies assure us that they eliminate many of the risks
currently associated with nuclear energy, from meltdowns to longterm waste storage to weaponization of
enriched uranium. And perhaps they do have the potential to eliminate some of those risks. But since these
technologies are untested, and some may carry even greater risks, the onus is on the boosters, not on the
rest of us, to demonstrate their safety. All the more so because we have proven clean, renewable
technologies available, and democratic, participatory models for their implementation, that demand no such
risks.

~ There is a great deal of confusion about the climate benefits of natural gas because the fuel is often given
credit for a 12 percent drop in U.S. carbon dioxide emissions since 2007. But this good news does not
address the fact that methane emissions have been rising over the past decade, or the fact that U.S. methane
emissions are very likely underestimated, since leakage has been extremely poorly accounted for.
Moreover, many experts and modelers warn that any climate gains from the shale boom will continue to be
undercut not only by potent methane emissions, but also by the tendency of cheap natural gas to displace
wind and solar. Similarly, as coal generation is displaced by natural gas in the U.S., coal companies are
simply exporting their dirty product overseas, which according to one analysis by the CO2 Scorecard Group
has "more than offset" the emissions savings from natural gas since 2007.

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BEYOND EXTRACTIVISM

Confronting the Climate Denier Within

"The best thing about the Earth is if you poke holes in it oil and gas comes
out."

-Republican U.S. Congressman Steve Stockman, 20 13 1
"The open veins of Latin America are still bleeding."

-Bolivian Indigenous leader Nilda Rojas Huanca, 2014"

"It is our predicament that we live in a finite world, and yet we behave
as if it were infinite. Steady exponential material growth with no limits
on resource consumption and population is the dominant conceptual
model used by today's decision makers. This is an approximation of
reality that is no longer accurate and [has] started to break down."

-Global systems analyst Rodrigo Castro and colleagues, paper presented at a

scientific modeling conference, 2014

For the past few years, the island of Nauru has been on a health kick. The concrete
walls of public buildings are covered in murals urging regular exercise and healthy
eating, and warning against the danger of diabetes. Young people are asking their
grandparents how to fish, a lost skill. But there is a problem. As Nerida-Ann
Steshia Hubert, who works at a diabetes center on the island, explains, life spans
on Nauru are short, in part because of an epidemic of the disease. "The older folks
are passing away early and we're losing a lot of the knowledge with them. It's like

a race against time — trying to get the knowledge from them before they die."

For decades, this tiny, isolated South Pacific island, just twenty-one square
kilometers and home to ten thousand people, was held up as a model for the

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world — a developing country that was doing everything right. In the early 1960s,
the Australian government, whose troops seized control of Nauru from the
Germans in 1914, was so proud of its protectorate that it made promotional videos
showing the Micronesians in starched white Bermuda shorts, obediently following
lessons in English-speaking schools, settling their disputes in British-style courts,
and shopping for modern conveniences in well-stocked grocery stores.

During the 1970s and 1980s, after Nauru had earned independence, the island
was periodically featured in press reports as a place of almost obscene riches, much
as Dubai is invoked today. An Associated Press article from 1985 reported that
Nauruans had "the world's highest per capita gross national product . . . higher even
than Persian Gulf oil Sheikdoms." Everyone had free health care, housing, and
education; homes were kept cool with air-conditioning; and residents zoomed
around their tiny island — it took twenty minutes to make the entire loop — in brand-
new cars and motorcycles. A police chief famously bought himself a yellow
Lamborghini. "When I was young," recalls Steshia Hubert, "we would go to
parties where people would throw thousands of dollars on the babies. Extravagant
parties — first, sixteenth, eighteenth, twenty-first, and fiftieth birthdays.... They
would come with gifts like cars, pillows stuffed with hundred-dollar bills — for
one-year-old babies!"

All of Nauru's monetary wealth derived from an odd geological fact. For
hundreds of thousands of years, when the island was nothing but a cluster of coral
reefs protruding from the waves, Nauru was a popular pit stop for migrating birds,
who dropped by to feast on the shellfish and mollusks. Gradually, the bird poop
built up between the coral towers and spires, eventually hardening to form a rocky
landmass. The rock was then covered over in topsoil and dense forest, creating a
tropical oasis of coconut palms, tranquil beaches, and thatched huts so beatific that

the first European visitors dubbed the island Pleasant Isle.

For thousands of years, Nauruans lived on the surface of their island, sustaining
themselves on fish and black noddy birds. That began to change when a colonial
officer picked up a rock that was later discovered to be made of almost pure
phosphate of lime, a valuable agricultural fertilizer. A German-British firm began
mining, later replaced by a British-Australian-New Zealand venture. Nauru
started developing at record speed — the catch was that it was, simultaneously,
commiting suicide.

By the 1960s, Nauru still looked pleasant enough when approached from the
sea, but it was a mirage. Behind the narrow fringe of coconut palms circling the
coast lay a ravaged interior. Seen from above, the forest and topsoil of the oval

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island were being voraciously stripped away; the phosphate mined down to the
island's sharply protruding bones, leaving behind a forest of ghostly coral totems.
With the center now uninhabitable and largely infertile except for some minor
scrubby vegetation, life on Nauru unfolded along the thin coastal strip, where the

homes and civic structures were located.

Nauru's successive waves of colonizers — whose economic emissaries ground
up the phosphate rock into fine dust, then shipped it on ocean liners to fertilize soil
in Australia and New Zealand — had a simple plan for the country: they would keep
mining phosphate until the island was an empty shell. "When the phosphate supply
is exhausted in thirty to forty years' time, the experts predict that the estimated
population will not be able to live on this pleasant little island," a Nauruan council
member said, rather stiffly, in a sixties-era black-and-white video produced by the
Australian government. But not to worry, the film's narrator explained:
"Preparations are being made now for the future of the Nauruan people. Australia
has offered them a permanent home within her own shores.. . . Their prospects are
bright; their future is secure."

Nauru, in other words, was developed to disappear, designed by the Australian
government and the extractive companies that controlled its fate as a disposable
country. It's not that they had anything against the place, no genocidal intent per
se. It's just that one dead island that few even knew existed seemed like an
acceptable sacrifice to make in the name of the progress represented by industrial
agriculture.

When the Nauruans themselves took control of their country in 1968, they had
hopes of reversing these plans. Toward that end, they put a large chunk of their
mining revenues into a trust fund that they invested in what seemed like stable real
estate ventures in Australia and Hawaii. The goal was to live off the fund's
proceeds while winding down phosphate mining and beginning to rehabilitate their
island's ecology — a costly task, but perhaps not impossible.

The plan failed. Nauru's government received catastrophically bad investment
advice, and the country's mining wealth was squandered. Meanwhile, Nauru
continued to disappear, its white powdery innards loaded onto boats as the mining
continued unabated. Meanwhile, decades of easy money had taken a predictable
toll on Nauruans' life and culture. Politics was rife with corruption, drunk driving
was a leading cause of death, average life expectancy was dismally low, and Nauru
earned the dubious honor of being featured on a U.S. news show as "the fattest
place on Earth" (half the adult population suffers from type 2 diabetes, the result
of a diet comprised almost exclusively of imported processed food). "During the

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golden era when the royalties were rolling in, we didn't cook, we ate in
restaurants," recalls Steshia Hubert, a health care worker. And even if the Nauruans
had wanted to eat differently, it would have been hard: with so much of the island
a latticework of deep dark holes, growing enough fresh produce to feed the
population was pretty much impossible. A bitterly ironic infertility for an island

whose main export was agricultural fertilizer.

By the 1990s, Nauru was so desperate for foreign currency that it pursued some
distinctly shady get-rich-quick schemes. Aided greatly by the wave of financial
deregulation unleashed in this period, the island became a prime money-laundering
haven. For a time in the late 1990s, Nauru was the titular "home" to roughly four
hundred phantom banks that were utterly unencumbered by monitoring, oversight,
taxes, and regulation. Nauru-registered shell banks were particularly popular
among Russian gangsters, who reportedly laundered a staggering $70 billion of
dirty money through the island nation (to put that in perspective, Nauru's entire
GDP is $72 million, according to most recent figures). Giving the country partial
credit for the collapse of the Russian economy, a New York Times Magazinepiece
in 2000 pronounced that "amid the recent proliferation of money-laundering
centers that experts estimate has ballooned into a $5 trillion shadow economy,

Nauru is Public Enemy #1."

These schemes have since caught up with Nauru too, and now the country faces
a double bankruptcy: with 90 percent of the island depleted from mining, it faces
ecological bankruptcy; with a debt of at least $800 million, Nauru faces financial
bankruptcy as well. But these are not Nauru's only problems. It now turns out that
the island nation is highly vulnerable to a crisis it had virtually no hand in creating:
climate change and the drought, ocean acidification, and rising waters it brings.
Sea levels around Nauru have been steadily climbing by about 5 millimeters per
year since 1993, and much more could be on the way if current trends continue.

Intensified droughts are already causing severe freshwater shortages.

A decade ago, Australian philosopher and professor of sustainability Glenn
Albrecht set out to coin a term to capture the particular form of psychological
distress that sets in when the homelands that we love and from which we take
comfort are radically altered by extraction and industrialization, rendering them
alienating and unfamiliar. He settled on "solastalgia," with its evocations of solace,
destruction, and pain, and defined the new word to mean, "the homesickness you
have when you are still at home." He explained that although this particular form
of unease was once principally familiar to people who lived in sacrifice zones —
lands decimated by open-pit mining, for instance, or clear-cut logging — it was fast

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becoming a universal human experience, with climate change creating a "new
abnormal" wherever we happen to live. "As bad as local and regional negative
transformation is, it is the big picture, the Whole Earth, which is now a home under
assault. A feeling of global dread asserts itself as the planet heats and our climate
gets more hostile and unpredictable," he writes. 15

Some places are unlucky enough to experience both local and global solastalgia
simultaneously. Speaking to the 1997 U.N. climate conference that adopted the
Kyoto Protocol, Nauru's then-president Kinza Clodumar described the collective
claustrophobia that had gripped his country: "We are trapped, a wasteland at our
back, and to our front a terrifying, rising flood of biblical proportions." 1 ^ Few
places on earth embody the suicidal results of building our economies on polluting
extraction more graphically than Nauru. Thanks to its mining of phosphate, Nauru
has spent the last century disappearing from the inside out; now, thanks to our
collective mining of fossil fuels, it is disappearing from the outside in.

In a 2007 cable about Nauru, made public by WikiLeaks, an unnamed U.S.
official summed up his government's analysis of what went wrong on the island:

"Nauru simply spent extravagantly, never worrying about tomorrow." Fair
enough, but that diagnosis is hardly unique to Nauru; our entire culture is
extravagantly drawing down finite resources, never worrying about tomorrow. For
a couple of hundred years we have been telling ourselves that we can dig the
midnight black remains of other life forms out of the bowels of the earth, burn
them in massive quantities, and that the airborne particles and gases released into
the atmosphere — because we can't see them — will have no effect whatsoever. Or
if they do, we humans, brilliant as we are, will just invent our way out of whatever
mess we have made.

And we tell ourselves all kinds of similarly implausible no-consequences stories
all the time, about how we can ravage the world and suffer no adverse effects.
Indeed we are always surprised when it works out otherwise. We extract and do
not replenish and wonder why the fish have disappeared and the soil requires ever
more "inputs" (like phosphate) to stay fertile. We occupy countries and arm their
militias and then wonder why they hate us. We drive down wages, ship jobs
overseas, destroy worker protections, hollow out local economies, then wonder
why people can't afford to shop as much as they used to. We offer those failed
shoppers subprime mortgages instead of steady jobs and then wonder why no one
foresaw that a system built on bad debts would collapse.

At every stage our actions are marked by a lack of respect for the powers we are
unleashing — a certainty, or at least a hope, that the nature we have turned to

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garbage, and the people we have treated like garbage, will not come back to haunt
us. And Nauru knows all about this too, because in the past decade it has become
a dumping ground of another sort. In an effort to raise much needed revenue, it
agreed to house an offshore refugee detention center for the government of
Australia. In what has become known as "the Pacific Solution," Australian navy
and customs ships intercept boats of migrants and immediately fly them three
thousand kilometers to Nauru (as well as to several other Pacific islands). Once on
Nauru, the migrants — most from Afghanistan, Sri Lanka, Iraq, Iran, and
Pakistan — are crammed into a rat-infested guarded camp made up of rows of
crowded, stiflingly hot tents. The island imprisonment can last up to five years,
with the migrants in a state of constant limbo about their status, something the

Australian government hopes will serve as a deterrent to future refugees.

The Australian and Nauruan governments have gone to great lengths to limit
information on camp conditions and have prevented journalists who make the long
journey to the island from seeing where migrants are being housed. But the truth
is leaking out nonetheless: grainy video of prisoners chanting "We are not
animals"; reports of mass hunger strikes and suicide attempts; horrifying
photographs of refugees who had sewn their own mouths shut, using paper clips
as needles; an image of a man who had badly mutilated his neck in a failed hanging
attempt. There are also images of toddlers playing in the dirt and huddling with
their parents under tent flaps for shade (originally the camp had housed only adult
males, but now hundreds of women and children have been sent there too). In June
2013, the Australian government finally allowed a BBC crew into the camp in
order to show off its brand-new barracks — but that PR attempt was completely
upstaged one month later by the news that a prisoner riot had almost completely

destroyed the new facility, leaving several prisoners injured.

Amnesty International has called the camp on Nauru "cruel" and "degrading,"
and a 2013 report by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees
concluded that those conditions, "coupled with the protracted period spent there
by some asylum-seekers, raise serious issues about their compatibility with
international human rights law, including the prohibition against torture and cruel,
inhuman or degrading treatment." Then, in March 2014, a former Salvation Army
employee named Mark Isaacs, who had been stationed at the camp, published a
tell-all memoir titled The Undesirables. He wrote about men who had survived
wars and treacherous voyages losing all will to live on Nauru, with one man
resorting to swallowing cleaning fluids, another driven mad and barking like a dog.
Isaacs likened the camp to "death factories," and said in an interview that it is about

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"taking resilient men and grinding them into the dust." On an island that itself was
systematically ground to dust, it's a harrowing image. As harrowing as enlisting
the people who could very well be the climate refugees of tomorrow to play warden

to the political and economic refugees of today.

Reviewing the island's painful history, it strikes me that so much of what has
gone wrong on Nauru — and goes on still — has to do with its location, frequently
described as "the middle of nowhere" or, in the words of a 1921 National
Geographicdispatch, "perhaps the most remote territory in the world," a tiny dot
"in lonely seas." The nation's remoteness made it aconvenient trash can — a place
to turn the land into trash, to launder dirty money, to disappear unwanted people,

and now a place that may be allowed to disappear altogether.

This is our relationship to much that we cannot easily see and it is a big part of
what makes carbon pollution such a stubborn problem: we can't see it, so we don't
really believe it exists. Ours is a culture of disavowal, of simultaneously knowing
and not knowing — the illusion of proximity coupled with the reality of distance is
the trick perfected by the fossil-fueled global market. So we both know and don't
know who makes our goods, who cleans up after us, where our waste disappears
to — whether it's our sewage or electronics or our carbon emissions.

But what Nauru's fate tells us is that there is no middle of nowhere, nowhere
that doesn't "count" — and that nothing ever truly disappears. On some level we all
know this, that we are part of a swirling web of connections. Yet we are trapped in
linear narratives that tell us the opposite: that we can expand infinitely, that there
will always be more space to absorb our waste, more resources to fuel our wants,
more people to abuse.

These days, Nauru is in a near constant state of political crisis, with fresh
corruption scandals perpetually threatening to bring down the government, and
sometimes succeeding. Given the wrong visited upon the nation, the island's
leaders would be well within their rights to point fingers outward — at their former
colonial masters who flayed them, at the investors who fleeced them, and at the
rich countries whose emissions now threaten to drown them. And some do. But
several of Nauru's leaders have also chosen to do something else: to hold up their
country as a kind of warning to a warming world.

In The New York Times in 2011, for instance, then-president Marcus Stephen
wrote that Nauru provides "an indispensable cautionary tale about life in a place
with hard ecological limits." It shows, he claimed, "what can happen when a
country runs out of options. The world is headed down a similar path with the
relentless burning of coal and oil, which is altering the planet's climate, melting

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ice caps, making oceans more acidic and edging us ever closer to a day when no
one will be able to take clean water, fertile soil or abundant food for granted." In

other words, Nauru isn't the only one digging itself to death; we all are.

But the lesson Nauru has to teach is not only about the dangers of fossil fuel
emissions. It is about the mentality that allowed so many of us, and our ancestors,
to believe that we could relate to the earth with such violence in the first place —
to dig and drill out the substances we desired while thinking little of the trash left
behind, whether in the land and water where the extraction takes place, or in the
atmosphere, once the extracted material is burned. This carelessness is at the core
of an economic model some political scientists call "extractivism," a term
originally used to describe economies based on removing ever more raw materials
from the earth, usually for export to traditional colonial powers, where "value" was
added. And it's a habit of thought that goes a long way toward explaining why an
economic model based on endless growth ever seemed viable in the first place.
Though developed under capitalism, governments across the ideological spectrum
now embrace this resource-depleting model as a road to development, and it is this
logic that climate change calls profoundly into question.

Extractivism is a nonreciprocal, dominance-based relationship with the earth,
one purely of taking. It is the opposite of stewardship, which involves taking but
also taking care that regeneration and future life continue. Extractivism is the
mentality of the mountaintop remover and the old-growth clear-cutter. It is the
reduction of life into objects for the use of others, giving them no integrity or value
of their own — turning living complex ecosystems into "natural resources,"
mountains into "overburden" (as the mining industry terms the forests, rocks, and
streams that get in the way of its bulldozers). It is also the reduction of human
beings either into labor to be brutally extracted, pushed beyond limits, or,
alternatively, into social burden, problems to be locked out at borders and locked
away in prisons or reservations. In an extractivist economy, the interconnections
among these various objectified components of life are ignored; the consequences
of severing them are of no concern.

Extractivism is also directly connected to the notion of sacrifice zones — places
that, to their extractors, somehow don't count and therefore can be poisoned,
drained, or otherwise destroyed, for the supposed greater good of economic
progress. This toxic idea has always been intimately tied to imperialism, with
disposable peripheries being harnessed to feed a glittering center, and it is bound
up too with notions of racial superiority, because in order to have sacrifice zones,
you need to have people and cultures who count so little that they are considered

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deserving of sacrifice. Extractivism ran rampant under colonialism because
relating to the world as a frontier of conquest — rather than as home — fosters this
particular brand of irresponsibility. The colonial mind nurtures the belief that there
is always somewhere else to go to and exploit once the current site of extraction
has been exhausted.

These ideas predate industrial- scale extraction of fossil fuels. And yet the ability
to harness the power of coal to power factories and ships is what, more than any
single other factor, enabled these dangerous ideas to conquer the world. It's a
history worth exploring in more depth, because it goes a long way toward
explaining how the climate crisis challenges not only capitalism but the underlying
civilizational narratives about endless growth and progress within which we are
all, in one way or another, still trapped.

The Ultimate Extractivist Relationship

If the modern-day extractive economy has a patron saint, the honor should
probably go to Francis Bacon. The English philosopher, scientist, and statesman is
credited with convincing Britain's elites to abandon, once and for all, pagan
notions of the earth as a life-giving mother figure to whom we owe respect and
reverence (and more than a little fear) and accept the role as her dungeon master.
"For you have but to follow and as it were hound nature in her wanderings," Bacon
wrote in De Augmentis Scientiarum in 1623, "and you will be able, when you like,
to lead and drive her afterwards to the same place again. . . . Neither ought a man to
make scruple of entering and penetrating into these holes and corners, when the

inquisition of truth is his sole object."^ (Not surprisingly, feminist scholars have
filled volumes analyzing the ex-Lord Chancellor's metaphor choices.)

These ideas of a completely knowable and controllable earth animated not only
the Scientific Revolution but, critically, the colonial project as well, which sent
ships crisscrossing the globe to poke and prod and bring the secrets, and wealth,
back to their respective crowns. The mood of human invincibility that governed
this epoch was neatly encapsulated in the words of clergyman and philosopher
William Derham in his 1713 bookPhysico-Theology: "We can, if need be, ransack
the whole globe, penetrate into the bowels of the earth, descend to the bottom of

the deep, travel to the farthest regions of this world, to acquire wealth."

And yet despite this bravado, throughout the 1700s, the twin projects of
colonialism and industrialization were still constrained by nature on several key

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fronts. Ships carrying both slaves and the raw materials they harvested could sail
only when winds were favorable, which could lead to long delays in the supply
chain. The factories that turned those raw materials into finished products were
powered by huge water wheels. They needed to be located next to waterfalls or
rapids which made them dependent on the flow and levels of rivers. As with high
or low winds at sea, an especially dry or wet spell meant that working hours in the
textile, flour, and sugar mills had to be adjusted accordingly — a mounting
annoyance as markets expanded and became more global.

Many water-powered factories were, by necessity, spread out around the
countryside, near bodies of fast-moving water. As the Industrial Revolution
matured and workers in the mills started to strike and even riot for better wages
and conditions, this decentralization made factory owners highly vulnerable, since
quickly finding replacement workers in rural areas was difficult.

Beginning in 1776, a Scottish engineer named James Watt perfected and
manufactured a power source that offered solutions to all these vulnerabilities.
Lawyer and historian Barbara Freese describes Watt's steam engine as "perhaps
the most important invention in the creation of the modern world" — and with good

reason. By adding a separate condenser, air pump, and later a rotary mechanism
to an older model, Watt was able to make the coal-fired steam engine vastly more
powerful and adaptable than its predecessors. In contrast, the new machines could
power a broad range of industrial operations, including, eventually, boats.

For the first couple of decades, the new engine was a tough sell. Water power,
after all, had a lot going for it compared with coal. For one thing, it was free, while
coal needed to be continually re-purchased. And contrary to the widespread belief
that the steam engine provided more energy than water wheels, the two were
actually comparable, with the larger wheelspacking several times more
horsepower than their coal-powered rivals. Water wheels also operated more
smoothly, with fewer technical breakdowns, so long as the water was flowing.
"The transition from water to steam in the British cotton industry did not occur
because water was scarce, less powerful, or more expensive than steam," writes
Swedish coal expert Andreas Malm. "To the contrary, steam gained supremacy in
spite of water being abundant, at least as powerful, and decidedly cheaper,"

As Britain's urban population ballooned, two factors tipped the balance in favor
of the steam engine. The first was the new machine's insulation from nature's
fluctuations: unlike water wheels, steam engines worked at the same rate all the
time, so long as there was coal to feed them and the machinery wasn't broken. The
flow rates of rivers were of no concern. Steam engines also worked anywhere,

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regardless of the geography, which meant that factory owners could shift
production from more remote areas to cities like London, Manchester, and
Lancaster, where there were gluts of willing industrial workers, making it far easier
to fire troublemakers and put down strikes. As an 1832 article written by a British
economist explained, "The invention of the steam-engine has relieved us from the
necessity of building factories in inconvenient situations merely for the sake of a
waterfall." Or as one of Watt's early biographers put it, the generation of power
"will no longer depend, as heretofore, on the most inconstant of natural causes —

on atmospheric influences."

Similarly, when Watt's engine was installed in a boat, ship crews were liberated
from having to adapt their journeys to the winds, a development that rapidly
accelerated the colonial project and the ability of European powers to easily annex
countries in distant lands. As the Earl of Liverpool put it in a public meeting to
memorialize James Watt in 1824, "Be the winds friendly or be they contrary, the
power of the Steam Engine overcomes all difficulties.... Let the wind blow from
whatever quarter it may, let the destination of our force be to whatever part of the
world it may, you have the power and the means, by the Steam Engine, of applying

that force at the proper time and in the proper manner."^ Not until the advent of
electronic trading would commerce feel itself so liberated from the constraints of
living on a planet bound by geography and governed by the elements.

Unlike the energy it replaced, power from fossil fuel always required sacrifice
zones — whether in the black lungs of the coal miners or the poisoned waterways
surrounding the mines. But these prices were seen as worth paying in exchange for
coal's intoxicating promise of freedom from the physical world — a freedom that
unleashed industrial capitalism's full force to dominate both workers and other
cultures. With their portable energy creator, the industrialists and colonists of the
1800s could now go wherever labor was cheapest and most exploitable, and
wherever resources were most plentiful and valuable. As the author of a steam
engine manual wrote in the mid- 1830s, "Its mighty services are always at our
command, whether in winter or in summer, by day or by night — it knows of no

intermission but what our wishes dictate." Coal represented, in short, total
domination, of both nature and other people, the full realization of Bacon's dream
at last. "Nature can be conquered," Watt reportedly said, "if we can but find her
weak side." 12

Little wonder then that the introduction of Watt's steam engine coincided with
explosive levels of growth in British manufacturing, such that in the eighty years
between 1760 and 1840, the country went from importing 2.5 million pounds of

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raw cotton to importing 366 million pounds of raw cotton, a genuine revolution
made possible by the potent and brutal combination of coal at home and slave labor
abroad. 11

This recipe produced more than just new consumer products. In Ecological
Economics, Herman Daly and Joshua Farley point out that Adam Smith
published The Wealth of Nations in 1776 — the same year that Watt produced his
first commercial steam engine. "It is no coincidence," they write, "that the market
economy and fossil fuel economy emerged at essentially the exact same
time.... New technologies and vast amounts of fossil energy allowed
unprecedented production of consumer goods. The need for new markets for these
mass-produced consumer goods and new sources of raw material played a role in
colonialism and the pursuit of empire. The market economy evolved as an efficient
way of allocating such goods, and stimulating the production of even more."" Just
as colonialism needed coal to fulfill its dream of total domination, the deluge of
products made possible by both coal and colonialism needed modern capitalism.

The promise of liberation from nature that Watt was selling in those early days
continues to be the great power of fossil fuels. That power is what allows today's
multinationals to scour the globe for the cheapest, most exploitable workforce,
with natural features and events that once appeared as obstacles — vast oceans,
treacherous landscapes, seasonal fluctuations — no longer even registering as
minor annoyances. Or so it seemed for a time.

It is often said that Mother Nature bats last, and this has been poignantly the case
for some of the men who were most possessed by the ambition of conquering her.
A perhaps apocryphal story surrounds the death of Francis Bacon: in an attempt to
test his hypothesis that frozen meat could be prevented from rotting, he traipsed
around in chilly weather stuffing a chicken full of snow. As a result, it is said, the

philosopher caught pneumonia, which eventually led to his demise." Despite some
controversy, the anecdote survives for its seeming poetic justice: a man who
thought nature could be bent to his will died from simple exposure to the cold.

A similar story of comeuppance appears to be unfolding for the human race as
a whole. Ralph Waldo Emerson called coal "a portable climate" — and it has been
a smash success, carrying countless advantages, from longer life spans to hundreds

of millions freed from hard labor. And yet precisely because our bodies are so
effectively separated from our geographies, we who have access to this privilege
have proven ourselves far too capable of ignoring the fact that we aren't just

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changing our personal climate but the entire planet' s climate as well, warming not
just the indoors but the outdoors too. And yet the warming is no less real for our
failure to pay attention.

The harnessing of fossil fuel power seemed, for a couple of centuries at least, to
have freed large parts of humanity from the need to be in constant dialogue with
nature, having to adjust its plans, ambitions, and schedules to natural fluctuations
and topographies. Coal and oil, precisely because they were fossilized, seemed
entirely possessable forms of energy. They did not behave independently — not like
wind, or water, or, for that matter, workers. Just as Watt's engine promised, once
purchased, they produced power wherever and whenever their owners wished —
the ultimate nonreciprocal relationship.

But what we have learned from atmospheric science is that the give-and-take,
call-and-response that is the essence of all relationships in nature was not
eliminated with fossil fuels, it was merely delayed, all the while gaining force and
velocity. Now the cumulative effect of those centuries of burned carbon is in the
process of unleashing the most ferocious natural tempers of all.

As a result, the illusion of total power and control Watt and his cohorts once
peddled has given way to the reality of near total powerlessness and loss of control
in the face of such spectacular forces as Hurricane Sandy and Typhoon Haiyan.
Which is just one of the reasons climate change is so deeply frightening. Because
to confront this crisis truthfully is to confront ourselves — to reckon, as our
ancestors did, with our vulnerability to the elements that make up both the planet
and our bodies. It is to accept (even embrace) being but one porous part of the
world, rather than its master or machinist, as Bacon long ago promised. There can
be great well-being in that realization of interconnection, pleasure too. But we
should not underestimate the depth of the civilizational challenge that this
relationship represents. As Australian political scientist Clive Hamilton puts it,
facing these truths about climate change "means recognizing that the power
relation between humans and the earth is the reverse of the one we have assumed

for three centuries."

For one of those centuries, a huge white marble statue of James Watt dominated
St. Paul's chapel in Westminster Abbey, commemorating a man who "enlarged
the resources of his Country" and "increased the power of Man." And Watt
certainly did that: his engine massively accelerated the Industrial Revolution and
the steamships his engine made possible subsequently opened sub-Saharan Africa
and India to colonial pillage. So while making Europe richer, he also helped make
many other parts of the world poorer, carbon-fueled inequalities that persist to this

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day. Indeed, coal was the black ink in which the story of modern capitalism was
written.

But all the facts were not yet in when Watt was being memorialized in marble
in 1825. Because it is the cumulative impact of the carbon emissions that began in
those early mills and mines that has already engraved itself in the geologic
record — in the levels of the oceans, in their chemical composition, in the slow
erasure of islands like Nauru; in the retreat of glaciers, the collapse of ice shelves,
the thawing of permafrost; in the disturbed soil cycles and in the charred forests.

Indeed, it turns out that coal's earliest casualties — the miners who died from
black lung, the workers in the Satanic Mills — were not merely the price of
progress. They were also an early warning that we were unleashing a poisonous
substance onto the world. "It has become clear over the last century," writes
Ecuadorian ecologist Esperanza Martinez, "that fossil fuels, the energy sources of
capitalism, destroy life — from the territories where they are extracted to the oceans

and the atmosphere that absorb the waste."" -

Jean-Paul Sartre called fossil fuels "capital bequeathed to mankind by other
living beings"; they are quite literally the decayed remnants of long-dead life-
forms. It's not that these substances are evil; it's just that they belong where they
are: in the ground, where they are performing valuable ecological functions. Coal,
when left alone, helpfully sequesters not just the carbon long ago pulled out of the
air by plants, but all kinds of other toxins. It acts, as world-renowned Australian
climate scientist Tim Flannery puts it, like "a natural sponge that absorbs many

substances dissolved in groundwater, from uranium to cadmium and mercury."

When coal is dug up and burned, however, those toxins are released in the
ecosystem, eventually making their way into the oceans, where they are absorbed
by krill and plankton, then by fish, and then by us. The released carbon, meanwhile,
enters the atmosphere, causing global warming (not to mention coal's contribution
to the smog and particulate pollution that have plagued urban society since the
Industrial Revolution, afflicting untold numbers of people with respiratory, heart,
and other diseases).

Given this legacy, our task is not small, but it is simple: rather than a society of
grave robbers, we need to become a society of life amplifiers, deriving our energy
directly from the elements that sustain life. It's time to let the dead rest.

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The Extractivist Left

The braided historical threads of colonialism, coal, and capitalism shed significant
light on why so many of us who are willing to challenge the injustices of the market
system remain paralyzed in the face of the climate threat. Fossil fuels, and the
deeper extractivist mind-set that they represent, built the modern world. If we are
part of industrial or postindustrial societies, we are still living inside the story
written in coal.

Ever since the French Revolution, there have been pitched ideological battles
within the confines of this story: communists, socialists, and trade unions have
fought for more equal distribution of the spoils of extraction, winning major
victories for the poor and working classes. And the human rights and emancipation
movements of this period have also fought valiantly against industrial capitalism' s
treatment of whole categories of our species as human sacrifice zones, no more
deserving of rights than raw commodities. These struggles have also won major
victories against the dominance-based paradigm — against slavery, for universal
suffrage, for equality under the law. And there have been voices in all of these
movements, moreover, that identified the parallels between the economic model's
abuse of the natural world and its abuse of human beings deemed worthy of being
sacrificed, or at least uncounted. Karl Marx, for instance, recognized capitalism's
"irreparable rift" with "the natural laws of life itself," while feminist scholars have
long recognized that patriarchy's dual war against women's bodies and against the
body of the earth were connected to that essential, corrosive separation between
mind and body — and between body and earth — from which both the Scientific

Revolution and Industrial Revolution sprang.

These challenges, however, were mainly in the intellectual realm; Bacon's
original, biblically inspired framework remained largely intact — the right of
humans to place ourselves above the ecosystems that support us and to abuse the
earth as if it were an inanimate machine. The strongest challenges to this
worldview have always come from outside its logic, in those historical junctures
when the extractive project clashes directly with a different, older way of relating
to the earth — and that older way fights back. This has been true from the earliest
days of industrialization, when English and Irish peasants, for instance, revolted
against the first attempts to enclose communal lands, and it has continued in
clashes between colonizers and Indigenous peoples through the centuries, right up
to — as we will see — the Indigenous-led resistance to extreme fossil fuel extraction
gaining power today.

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But for those of us born and raised inside this system, though we may well see
the dead-end flaw of its central logic, it can remain intensely difficult to see a way
out. And how could it be otherwise? Post-Enlightenment Western culture does not
offer a road map for how to live that is not based on an extractivist, nonreciprocal
relationship with nature.

This is where the right-wing climate deniers have overstated their conspiracy
theories about what a cosmic gift global warming is to the left. It is true, as I have
outlined, that many climate responses reinforce progressive support for
government intervention in the market, for greater equality, and for a more robust
public sphere. But the deeper message carried by the ecological crisis — that
humanity has to go a whole lot easier on the living systems that sustain us, acting
regeneratively rather than extractively — is a profound challenge to large parts of
the left as well as the right. It's a challenge to some trade unions, those trying to
freeze in place the dirtiest jobs, instead of fighting for the good clean jobs their
members deserve. And it's a challenge to the overwhelming majority of center-left
Keynesians, who still define economic success in terms of traditional measures of
GDP growth, regardless of whether that growth comes from rampant resource
extraction. (This is all the more baffling because Keynes himself, like John Stuart
Mill, advocated a transition to a post-growth economy.)

It's a challenge, too, to those parts of the left that equated socialism with the
authoritarian rule of the Soviet Union and its satellites (though there was always a
rich tradition, particularly among anarchists, that considered Stalin's project an
abomination of core social justice principles). Because the fact is that those self-
described socialist states devoured resources with as much enthusiasm as their
capitalist counterparts, and spewed waste just as recklessly. Before the fall of the
Berlin Wall, for instance, Czechs and Russians had even higher carbon footprints
per capita than Canadians and Australians. Which is why one of the only times the
developed world has seen a precipitous emissions drop was after the economic
collapse of the former Soviet Union in the early 1990s. Mao Zedong, for his part,
openly declared that "man must conquer nature," setting loose a devastating
onslaught on the natural world that transitioned seamlessly from clear-cuts under
communism to mega-dams under capitalism. Russia's oil and gas companies,
meanwhile, were as reckless and accident-prone under state socialist control as

they are today in the hands of the oligarchs and Russia's corporatist stated

And why wouldn't they be? Authoritarian socialism and capitalism share strong
tendencies toward centralizing (one in the hands of the state, the other in the hands
of corporations). They also both keep their respective systems going through

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ruthless expansion — whether through production for production's sake, in the case
of Soviet-era socialism, or consumption for consumption's sake, in the case of
consumer capitalism.

One possible bright spot is Scandinavian- style Social Democracy, which has
undoubtedly produced some of the most significant green breakthroughs in the
world, from the visionary urban design of Stockholm, where roughly 74 percent
of residents walk, bike, or take public transit to work, to Denmark's community-
controlled wind power revolution. And yet Norway's late-life emergence as a
major oil producer — with majority state- owned Statoil tearing up the Alberta tar
sands and gearing up to tap massive reserves in the Arctic — calls into question

whether these countries are indeed charting a path away from extractivism.

In Latin America and Africa, moving away from overdependence on raw
resource extraction and export, and toward more diversified economies, has always
been a central piece of the postcolonial project. And yet some countries where left
and center-left governments have come to power over the last decade are moving
in the opposite direction. The fact that this tendency is little discussed outside the
continent should not be surprising. Progressives around the world have rightfully
cheered Latin America's electoral "pink tide," with government after government
coming to power promising to reduce inequality, tackle extreme poverty, and take
back control over the extractive industries of their respective countries. And purely
from the perspective of poverty reduction, the results have often been stunning.

Since the election of Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, and now under the leadership of
his former chief of staff, Dilma Rousseff, Brazil has reduced its extreme poverty
rate by 65 percent in a single decade, according to the government. More than
thirty million people have been lifted out of poverty. After the election of Hugo
Chavez, Venezuela slashed the percentage of the population living in extreme
poverty by more than half — from 16.6 percent in 1999 to 7 percent in 2011,
according to government statistics. College enrollment has doubled since 2004.
Ecuador under Rafael Correa has dropped its poverty rates by 32 per cent,
according to the World Bank. In Argentina, urban poverty plummeted from 54.7
percent in 2003 to 6.5 percent in 201 1, according to government data collected by
the U.N.-

Bolivia's record, under the presidency of Evo Morales, is also impressive. It has
reduced the proportion of its population living in extreme poverty from 38 percent

in 2005 to 21.6 percent in 2012, according to government figures. And
unemployment rates have been cut in half. Most importantly, while other
developing countries have used growth to create societies of big winners and big

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losers, Bolivia is actually succeeding in building a more equal society. Alicia
Barcena Ibarra, executive secretary of the U.N. Economic Commission for Latin
America and the Caribbean, observes that in Bolivia "the gap between rich and

poor has been hugely narrowed."

All of this is a marked improvement over what came before, when the wealth
extracted from each of these countries was overwhelmingly concentrated among a
tiny elite, with far too much of it fleeing the continent entirely. And yet these left
and center-left governments have so far been unable to come up with economic
models that do not require extremely high levels of extraction of finite resources,
often at tremendous ecological and human cost. This is true for Ecuador, with its
growing oil dependence, including oil from the Amazon; Bolivia, with its huge
dependence on natural gas; Argentina, with its continued support for open-pit
mining and its "green deserts" of genetically modified soy and other crops; Brazil,
with its highly contentious mega-dams and forays into high-risk offshore oil
drilling; and of course it has always been the case for petro-dependent Venezuela.
Moreover, most of these governments have made very little progress on the old
dream of diversifying their economies away from raw resource exports — in fact,
between 2004 and 201 1, raw resources as a percentage of overall exports increased
in all of these countries except Argentina, though some of this increase was no
doubt due to rising commodity prices. It hasn't helped that China has been
throwing easy credit around the continent, in some cases demanding to be paid

back in oil.

This reliance on high risk and ecologically damaging forms of extraction is
particularly disappointing in the governments of Evo Morales in Bolivia and
Rafael Correa in Ecuador. In their first terms, both had signaled that a new,
nonextractive chapter was beginning in their countries. Part of this involved
granting real respect to the Indigenous cultures that had survived centuries of
marginalization and oppression and that form powerful political constituencies in
both countries. Under Morales and Correa, the Indigenous concepts of sumak
kawsaysind buen vivir, which strive to build societies in harmony with nature (in
which everyone has enough, rather than more and more), became the discourse of
government, even recognized in law. But in both cases, escalating industrial- scale
development and extraction has overtaken this promising rhetoric. According to
Ecuador's Esperanza Martinez, "Since 2007, Correa' s has been the most
extractivist government in the history of the country, in terms of oil and now also
mining." Indeed Latin American intellectuals have invented a new term to describe

what they are experiencing: "progressive extractivism."

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The governments claim they have no choice — that they need to pursue extractive
policies in order to pay for programs that alleviate poverty. And in many ways this
explanation comes back to the question of climate debt: Bolivia and Ecuador have
been at the forefront of the coalition of governments asking that the countries
responsible for the bulk of historical greenhouse gas emissions help to pay for the
Global South' s transition away from dirty energy and toward low-carbon
development. These calls have been alternatively ignored and dismissed. Forced
to choose between poverty and pollution, these governments are choosing
pollution, but those should not be their only options.

The default overreliance on dirty extraction is not only a problem for
progressives in the developing world. In Greece in May 2013, for instance, I was
surprised to discover that the left-wing Syriza party — then the country's official
opposition and held up by many progressive Europeans as the great hope for a real
political alternative on the continent — did not oppose the governing coalition's
embrace of new oil and gas exploration. Instead, it argued that any funds raised by
the effort should be spent on pensions, not used to pay back creditors. In other
words: they were not providing an alternative to extractivism but simply had better
plans for distributing the spoils.

Far from seeing climate change as an opportunity to argue for their socialist
Utopia, as conservative climate change deniers fear, Syriza had simply stopped
talking about global warming altogether.

This is something that the party's leader, Alexis Tsipras, admitted to me quite
openly in an interview: "We were a party that had the environment and climate
change in the center of our interest," he said. "But after these years of depression

in Greece, we forgot climate change." At least he was honest.

The good news, and it is significant, is that large and growing social movements
in all of these countries are pushing back against the idea that extraction- and-
redistribution is the only route out of poverty and economic crisis. There are
massive movements against gold mining in Greece, so large that Syriza has
become a significant opponent of the mines. In Latin America, meanwhile,
progressive governments are increasingly finding themselves in direct conflict
with many of the people who elected them, facing accusations that their new model
of what Hugo Chavez called "Twenty-first-Century Socialism" simply isn't new
enough. Huge hydro dams in Brazil, highways through sensitive areas in Bolivia,
and oil drilling in the Ecuadorian Amazon have all become internal flashpoints.
Yes, the wealth is better distributed, particularly among the urban poor, but outside
the cities, the ways of life of Indigenous peoples and peasants are still being

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endangered without their consent, and they are still being made landless by
ecosystem destruction. What is needed, writes Bolivian environmentalist Patricia
Molina, is a new definition of development, "so that the goal is the elimination of

poverty, and not of the poor."

This critique represents more than just the push and pull of politics; it is a
fundamental shift in the way an increasingly large and vocal political constituency
views the goal of economic activity and the meaning of development. Space is
opening up for a growing influence of Indigenous thought on new generations of
activists, beginning, most significantly, with Mexico's Zapatista uprising in 1994,
and continuing, as we will see, with the important leadership role that Indigenous
land-rights movements are playing in pivotal anti-extraction struggles in North
America, Latin America, Australia, and New Zealand. In part through these
struggles, non-Indigenous progressive movements are being exposed to
worldviews based on relationships of reciprocity and interconnection with the
natural world that are the antithesis of extractivism. These movements have truly
heard the message of climate change and are winning battles to keep significant
amounts of carbon in the ground.

Some Warnings, Unheeded

There is one other group that might have provided a challenge to Western culture's
disastrous view of nature as a bottomless vending machine. That group, of course,
is the environmental movement, the network of organizations that exists to protect
the natural world from being devoured by human activity. And yet the movement
has not played this role, at least not in a sustained and coherent manner.

In part, that has to do with the movement's unusually elite history, particularly
in North America. When conservationism emerged as a powerful force in the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, it was primarily about men of privilege
who enjoyed fishing, hunting, camping, and hiking and who recognized that many
of their favorite wilderness spots were under threat from the rapid expansion of
industrialization. For the most part, these men did not call into question the frenetic
economic project that was devouring natural landscapes all over the continent —
they simply wanted to make sure that some particularly spectacular pockets were
set aside for their recreation and aesthetic appreciation. Like the Christian
missionaries who traveled with traders and soldiers, most early preservationists
saw their work as a civilizing addendum to the colonial and industrial projects —

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not as a challenge to them. Writing in 1914, Bronx Zoo director William Temple
Hornaday summed up this ethos, urging American educators to "take up their share

of the white man's burden" and help to "preserve the wild life of our country."

This task was accomplished not with disruptive protests, which would have been
unseemly for a movement so entrenched in the upper stratum of society. Instead,
it was achieved through quiet lobbying, with well-bred men appealing to the
noblesse oblige of other men of their class to save a cherished area by turning it
into a national or state park, or a private family preserve — often at the direct
expense of Indigenous people who lost access to these lands as hunting and fishing
grounds. There were those in the movement, however, who saw in the threats to
their country's most beautiful places signs of a deeper cultural crisis. For instance,
John Muir, the great naturalist writer who helped found the Sierra Club in 1892,
excoriated the industrialists who dammed wild rivers and drowned beautiful
valleys. To him they were heathens — "devotees of ravaging commercialism" who
"instead of lifting their eyes to the God of the mountains, lift them to the Almighty

Dollar."-

He was not the only heretic. A strain of radicalism drove some of the early
Western ecological thinkers to argue for doing more than protecting isolated
landscapes. Though frequently unacknowledged, these thinkers often drew heavily
on Eastern beliefs about the interconnectedness of all life, as well as on Native
American cosmologies that see all living creatures as our "relations."

In the mid- 1800s, Henry David Thoreau wrote that, "The earth I tread on is not
a dead, inert mass. It is a body, has a spirit, is organic, and fluid to the influence of
its spirit, and to whatever particle of that spirit is in me." This was a straight
repudiation of Francis Bacon's casting of the earth as an inert machine whose
mysteries could be mastered by the human mind. And almost a century after
Thoreau, Aldo Leopold, whose book A Sand County Almanac was the touchstone
for a second wave of environmentalists, similarly called for an ethic that "enlarges
the boundaries of the community to include soils, waters, plants, and animals" and
that recognizes "the individual is a member of a community of interdependent
parts." A "land ethic," as he called it, "changes the role of Homo sapiens from
conqueror of the land-community to plain member and citizen of it. It implies
respect for his fellow-members, and also respect for the community as such."

These ideas were hugely influential in the evolution of ecological thought, but
unattached to populist movements, they posed little threat to galloping
industrialization. The dominant worldview continued to see humans as a
conquering army, subduing and mechanizing the natural world. Even so, by the

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1930s, with socialism on the rise around the world, the more conservative elements
of the growing environmental movement sought to distance themselves from
Leopold's "radical" suggestion that nature had an inherent value beyond its utility
to man. If watersheds and old-growth forests had a "right to continued existence,"
as Leopold argued (a preview of the "rights of nature" debates that would emerge
several decades later), then an owner's right to do what he wished with his land
could be called into question. In 1935, Jay Norwood "Ding" Darling, who would
later help found the National Wildlife Federation, wrote to Leopold warning him,
"I can't get away from the idea that you are getting us out into water over our depth
by your new philosophy of wildlife environment. The end of that road leads to
socialization of property."

By the time Rachel Carson published Silent Spring in 1962, the attempts to turn
nature into a mere cog in the American industrial machine had grown so
aggressive, so overtly militaristic, that it was no longer possible to pretend that
combining capitalism with conservation was simply a matter of protecting a few
pockets of green. Carson's book boiled over with righteous condemnations of a
chemical industry that used aerial bombardment to wipe out insects, thoughtlessly
endangering human and animal life in the process. The marine biologist-turned-
social-critic painted a vivid picture of the arrogant "control men" who, enthralled

with "a bright new toy," hurled poisons "against the fabric of life."^

Carson's focus was DDT, but for her the problem was not a particular chemical;
it was a logic. "The 'control of nature,' " Carson wrote, "is a phrase conceived in
arrogance, born of the Neanderthal age of biology and philosophy, when it was
supposed that nature exists for the convenience of man.... It is our alarming
misfortune that so primitive a science has armed itself with the most modern and
terrible weapons, and that in turning them against the insects it has also turned

them against the earth."^

Carson's writing inspired a new, much more radical generation of
environmentalists to see themselves as part of a fragile planetary ecosystem rather
than as its engineers or mechanics, giving birth to the field of Ecological
Economics. It was in this context that the underlying logic of extractivism — that
there would always be more earth for us to consume — began to be forcefully
challenged within the mainstream. The pinnacle of this debate came in 1972 when
the Club of Rome published The Limits to Growth, a runaway best- seller that used
early computer models to predict that if natural systems continued to be depleted
at their current rate, humanity would overshoot the planet's carrying capacity by
the middle of the twenty-first century. Saving a few beautiful mountain ranges

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wouldn't be enough to get us out of this fix; the logic of growth itself needed to be
confronted. As author Christian Parenti observed recently of the book's lasting
influence, "Limits combined the glamour of Big Science — powerful MIT
computers and support from the Smithsonian Institution — with a focus on the
interconnectedness of things, which fit perfectly with the new countercultural
Zeitgeist." And though some of the book's projections have not held up over
time — the authors underestimated, for instance, the capacity of profit incentives
and innovative technologies to unlock new reserves of finite resources — Limits was
right about the most important limit of all. On "the limits of natural 'sinks,' or the
Earth's ability to absorb pollution," Parenti writes, "the catastrophically bleak
vision of Limits is playing out as totally correct. We may find new inputs — more
oil or chromium — or invent substitutes, but we have not produced or discovered
more natural sinks. The Earth's capacity to absorb the filthy byproducts of global
capitalism's voracious metabolism is maxing out. That warning has always been

the most powerful part of The Limits to Growth."

And yet in the most powerful parts of the environmental movement, in the key
decades during which we have been confronting the climate threat, these voices of
warning have gone unheeded. The movement did not reckon with limits of growth
in an economic system built on maximizing profits, it instead tried to prove that
saving the planet could be a great new business opportunity.

The reasons for this political timidity have plenty to do with the themes already
discussed: the power and allure of free market logic that usurped so much
intellectual life in the late 1980s and 1990s, including large parts of the
conservation movement. But this persistent unwillingness to follow science to its
conclusions also speaks to the power of the cultural narrative that tells us that
humans are ultimately in control of the earth, and not the other way around. This
is the same narrative that assures us that, however bad things get, we are going to
be saved at the last minute — whether by the market, by philanthropic billionaires,
or by technological wizards — or bestof all, by all three at the same time. And while
we wait, we keep digging in deeper.

Only when we dispense with these various forms of magical thinking will we be
ready to leave extractivism behind and build the societies we need within the
boundaries we have — a world with no sacrifice zones, no new Naurus.

~ "In the morning I bathe my intellect in the stupendous and cosmogonal philosophy of the Bhagvat Geeta,"
wrote Thoreau in Walden of the famous Indian scripture. He continued, "I lay down the book and go to my
well for water and lo! there I meet the servant of the Brahmin, priest of Brahma and Vishnu and Indra, who
still sits in his temple on the Ganges reading the Vedas, or dwells at the root of a tree with his crust and
water jug.... The pure Walden water is mingled with the sacred water of the Ganges."

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PART TWO
MAGICAL THINKING

"Vast economic incentives exist to invent pills that would cure
alcoholism or drug addiction, and much snake oil gets peddled
claiming to provide such benefits. Yet substance abuse has not
disappeared from society. Given the addiction of modern
civilization to cheap energy, the parallel ought to be unnerving to
anyone who believes that technology alone will allow us to pull the
climate rabbit out of the fossil-fuel hat.... The hopes that many
Greens place in a technological fix are an expression of high-
modernist faith in the unlimited power of science and technology as
profound — and as rational — as Augustine's faith in Christ."

-Political scientist William Barnes and intellectual historian Nils

Gilman, 201 1 1

"The leaders of the largest environmental groups in the country
have become all too comfortable jet-setting with their handpicked
corporate board members, a lifestyle they owe to those same
corporate moguls. So it is little wonder that instead of prodding
their benefactors to do better, these leaders — always hungry for the
next donation — heap praise on every corporate half measure and at
every photo opportunity."

-Christine MacDonald, former employee of Conservation International,

2008 2

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FRUITS, NOT ROOTS

The Disastrous Merger of Big Business and Big Green

"Our arguments must translate into profits, earnings, productivity, and
economic incentives for industry."

-Former National Wildlife Federation President Jay Hair, 1987 1

"I know this seems antithetical, but the bottom line here is not whether
new coal-fired plants are built.... If the new coal plants are coming online
under a cap that is bringing total emissions down, then it is not the worst
thing in the world. Coal isn't the enemy. Carbon emissions are."

-Environmental Defense Fund President Fred Krupp, 2009

Before the twentieth century, as many as a million Attwater's prairie chickens
made their homes in the tall grasses along the coasts of Texas and

Louisiana." During mating season, they were quite a spectacle. To attract females,
the males stomped their feet in little staccato motions, made loud, spooky cooing
noises (known as "booming"), and inflated bright yellow air sacs on the sides of
their necks, giving them the appearance of having swallowed two golden eggs.

But as the native prairie was turned into subdivisions and sliced up by oil and
gas development, the Attwater's prairie chicken population began to crash. Local
birders mourned the loss and in 1965, The Nature Conservancy — renowned for
buying up ecologically important tracts of land and turning them into preserves —
opened a Texas chapter. Early on, one of its major priorities was saving the

Attwater's prairie chicken from extinction.

It wasn't going to be easy, even for what would become the richest
environmental organization in the world. One of the last remaining breeding
grounds was located on 2,303 acres in southeast Texas on the shore of Galveston

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Bay, a property that happened to be owned by Mobil (now ExxonMobil). The fossil
fuel giant hadn't yet covered the land in oil and gas infrastructure, but there were
active wells on its southern edge, closing in on the breeding grounds of the
endangered bird. Then in 1995, came some surprisingly good news. Mobil was
donating its Galveston Bay property to The Nature Conservancy — "the last best
hope of saving one of the world's most endangered species," as the company put
it. The conservancy, which named the land the Texas City Prairie Preserve, would
make "the recovery of the Attwater's prairie chicken" its "highest priority." To all
appearances, it was a shining conservation success story — proof that a non-
confrontational, partnership-based approach to environmentalism could yield
tangible results. But four years later, something very strange happened. The
Nature Conservancy began to do the very thing that its supporters thought it was
there to prevent: it began extracting fossil fuels on the preserve. In 1999, the
conservancy commissioned an oil and gas operator to sink a new gas well inside
the preserve, which would send millions in revenue flowing directly into the
environmental organization's coffers. And while the older oil and gas wells — those
drilled before the land was designated a bird preserve — were mostly clustered far
from the habitat of the Attwater's prairie chickens, that was decidedly not the case
for the new well. According to Aaron Tjelmeland, the current manager of the
preserve, the spot where the conservancy allowed drilling was relatively near the
areas where the endangered birds nested, as well as performed their distinctive
mating rituals. Of all the wells, this drilling pad was "the closest to where the
prairie chickens normally hung out, or normally boomed," he said in an interview. ~
For about three years, The Nature Conservancy's foray into the fossil fuel
business attracted relatively little public controversy. That changed in 2002, when
a piece in the Los Angeles Times exposed the drilling. For traditional
conservationists, it was a little like finding out that Amnesty International had
opened its own prison wing at Guantanamo. "They're exploiting the Attwater's
prairie chicken to make money," fumed Clait E. Braun, then president of the
Wildlife Society, and a leading expert on prairie chickens. Then, in May 2003, The
Washington Post followed up with a scathing investigation into the organization's
questionable land deals, delving deeper into the surprising fact that on the Texas
City Prairie Preserve, one of the most respected environmental organizations in the

United States was now moonlighting as a gas driller.

The Nature Conservancy, sounding like pretty much everyone in the oil and gas
business, insisted that, "We can do this drilling without harming the prairie
chickens and their habitat." But the track record on the preserve makes that far

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from clear. In addition to the increased traffic, light, and noise that are part of any
drilling operation, there were several points when drilling and wildlife preservation
seemed to come into direct conflict. For instance, because Attwater's prairie
chickens are so endangered, there is a public-private program that breeds them in
captivity and then releases them into the wild, an initiative in which The Nature
Conservancy was participating on the Texas City Prairie Preserve. But at one point
early on in its drilling foray, a delay in the construction of a gas pipeline led the
conservancy to postpone the release of the captive-bred chicks by three months —
a dicey call because migrating raptors and other predators appear to have been
waiting for them. 2

The bird release that year was a disaster. According to an internal Nature
Conservancy report, all seventeen of the chicks "died shortly after their delayed
release." The science director of the Texas chapter wrote that the months of waiting
had subjected the birds "to higher probability of death from raptor predation."
According to The Washington Post report, by 2003 there were just sixteen
Attwater's prairie chickens that The Nature Conservancy knew about on the
preserve, down from thirty-six before the drilling began. Though top conservancy
officials insisted that the birds had not been adversely affected by its industrial
activities, it was a dismal record. When I first came across the decade-old story,
I assumed that The Nature Conservancy's extraction activities had stopped when
they were exposed, since the revelation had ignited a firestorm of controversy and
forced the organization to pledge not to repeat this particular fundraising
technique. After the story broke, the organization's then president stated clearly,
"We won't initiate any new oil, gas drilling, or mining of hard rock minerals on
preserves that we own. We've only done that twice in 52 years but we thought,
nonetheless, we should, for appearances' sake, not do that again." 11

Turns out I was wrong. In fact, as of this book's writing, the conservancy
was still extracting hydrocarbons on the Texas preserve that it rescued from Mobil
back in 1995. In a series of communications, conservancy spokes-people insisted
that the organization was required to continue fossil fuel extracting under the terms
of the original drilling lease. And it's true that the 2003 pledge had been carefully
worded, promising not to initiate "any new" drilling activities, and containing a

proviso that it would honor "existing contracts."

But The Nature Conservancy has not simply continued extracting for gas in that
same well. A 2010 paper presented at a Society of Petroleum Engineers
conference, and coauthored by two conservancy officials, reveals that the original
well "died in March 2003, and was unable to flow due to excessive water

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production," leading to the drilling of a replacement well in the same area in late
2007. It also turns out that while the original well was for gas, the new one is now
producing only oil.~

Given that close to five years elapsed between the death of the Nature
Conservancy' s first well and the drilling of the replacement, it seems possible that
the organization had the legal grounds to extricate itself from the original lease if
it had been sufficiently motivated to do so. The lease I have seen states clearly that
in the event that oil or gas production ever stops in a given "well tract," the operator
has a 180-day window to begin "reworking" the well or to start drilling a new one.
If it fails to do so, the lease for that area is automatically terminated. If The Nature
Conservancy causes a delay in the operator's work — which the organization claims
has regularly occurred, since it restricts drilling to a few months per year — then
the 180-day window is extended by the equivalent amount of time. So, the
organization insists that though it was "concerned" about initial plans for the new
2007 well, due to the proposed well's proximity to the Attwater's habitat, it
believed it was "bound by the existing lease and required to permit the drilling of
the replacement well," albeit in a different location. James Petterson, director of
marketing strategies at the conservancy, told me that the organization had sought
"an outside legal opinion from an oil and gas expert" that confirmed this view. Yet
in an internal explanatory document on drilling entitled "Attwater's Prairie
Chicken Background," the organization emphasizes that it maintains the power to
control what can and cannot occur on the preserve. "Given the birds' endangered
status," the document states, "no activity can take place that is deemed likely to
harm the species." Petterson insists that "bird experts were consulted" and "nobody
[here] would want to do anything to harm an endangered species, particularly one
as endangered as the Attwater's Prairie Chicken ... nobody is going to choose oil

and gas development over the last remaining handful of birds on the planet."

Regardless of whether the conservancy resumed drilling for oil in Texas because
it had no choice or because it wanted to get the petro dollars flowing again after
the initial controversy had died down, the issue has taken on new urgency of late.
That's because, in November 2012, and with little fanfare, the last of the Attwater's
prairie chickens disappeared from the Preserve. Aaron Tjelmeland, the preserve
manager, said of the birds that there are "none that we know about." It is worth
underlining this detail: under the stewardship of what The New For&erdescribes as
"the biggest environmental nongovernmental organization in the world" —
boasting over one million members and assets of roughly $6 billion and operating
in thirty-five countries — an endangered species has been completely wiped out

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from one of its last remaining breeding grounds, on which the organization earned
millions drilling for and pumping oil and gas. Amazingly, the website for the Texas
City Prairie Preserve continues to boast that the "land management techniques the
conservancy utilizes at the preserve are best practices that we export to other
preserves." And though it mentions in passing that there are no more Attwater's
prairie chickens on the land, it says nothing about its side business in oil and gas. 15

The disappearance of the prairie chickens is no doubt the result of a combination
of factors — invasive species, low numbers of captive-bred birds, drought (possibly
linked to climate change), and the relatively small size of the reserve (the
conservancy's preferred explanation). It's possible that the oil and gas drilling
played no role at all. So let's set the birds aside for a moment. Even if a few had
survived, and even if a few return in the future, the fact remains that The Nature
Conservancy has been in the oil and gas business for a decade and half. That this
could happen in the age of climate change points to a painful reality behind the
environmental movement' s catastrophic failure to effectively battle the economic
interests behind our soaring emissions: large parts of the movement aren't actually
fighting those interests — they have merged with them.

The Nature Conservancy, I should stress, is the only green group (that I know
of, at least) to actually sink its own oil and gas wells. But it is far from the only
group to have strong ties with the fossil fuel sector and other major polluters. For
instance, Conservation International, The Nature Conservancy, and the
Conservation Fund have all received money from Shell and BP, while American
Electric Power, a traditional dirty-coal utility, has donated to the Conservation
Fund and The Nature Conservancy. WWF (originally the World Wildlife Fund)
has had a long relationship with Shell, and the World Resources Institute has what
it describes as "a long-term, close strategic relationship with the Shell
Foundation." Conservation International has partnerships with Walmart,
Monsanto, Australian-based mining and petroleum giant BHP Billiton (a major
extractor of coal), as well as Shell, Chevron, ExxonMobil, Toyota, McDonald's,
and BP (according to The Washington Post BP has channeled $2 million to

* 16

Conservation International over the years). And that is the barest of samplings.

The relationships are also more structural than mere donations and partnerships.
The Nature Conservancy counts BP America, Chevron, and Shell among the
members of its Business Council and Jim Rogers, chairman of the board and
former CEO of Duke Energy, one of the largest U.S. coal-burning utilities, sits on
the organization's board of directors (past board members include former CEOs of

General Motors and American Electric Power).

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There is yet another way in which some green groups have entangled their fates
with the corporations at the heart of the climate crisis: by investing their own
money with them. For instance, while investigating The Nature Conservancy's
foray into oil and gas drilling, I was struck by a line item in its 2012 financial
statements: $22.8 million of the organization's endowment — one of the largest in
the U.S. — was invested in "energy" companies (that figure has since gone up to
$26.5 million). Energy, of course, means oil, gas, coal, and the like. Curious, I
soon discovered that most big conservation groups did not have policies
prohibiting them from investing their endowments in fossil fuel companies. The
hypocrisy is staggering: these organizations raise mountains of cash every year on
the promise that the funds will be spent on work that is preserving wildlife and
attempting to prevent catastrophic global warming. And yet some have turned
around and invested that money with companies that have made it abundantly
clear, through their reserves, that they intend to extract several times more carbon
than the atmosphere can absorb with any degree of safety. It must be stated that
these choices, made unilaterally by the top tier of leadership at the big green
groups, do not represent the wishes or values of the millions of members who
support them through donations or join genuinely community supported
campaigns to clean up polluted rivers, protect beloved pieces of wilderness, or
support renewables legislation. Indeed, many have been deeply alarmed to
discover that groups they believed to be confronting polluters were in fact in
business with them.~

There are, moreover, large parts of the green movement that have never engaged
in these types of arrangements — they don't have endowments to invest or they
have clear policies prohibiting fossil fuel holdings, and some have equally clear
policies against taking donations from polluters. These groups, not coincidentally,
tend also to be the ones with track records of going head-to-head with big oil and
coal: Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace have been battling Shell's and
Chevron's alleged complicity with horrific human rights abuses in the Niger Delta
since the early 1990s (though Shell has agreed to pay out $15.5 million to settle a
case involving these claims, it continues to deny wrongdoing, as does Chevron);
Rainforest Action Network has been at the forefront of the international campaign
against Chevron for the disaster left behind in the Ecuadorian Amazon; Food &
Water Watch has helped secure big victories against fracking; 350.org helped
launch the fossil fuel divestment movement and has been at the forefront of the
national mobilization against the Keystone XL pipeline. The Sierra Club is a more
complex case: it has also been a part of these campaigns and is the bane of the U.S.

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coal industry — but between 2007 and 2010, the group secretly took millions from
a natural gas company. But under new leadership — and facing pressure from the

grass roots — it has cut ties with the fossil fuel sector.

Even so, almost no one's hands are clean. That's because many of the top
foundations that underwrite much of the environmental movement — including
groups and projects with which I have been involved — come from fortunes, like
the Rockefeller family's, that are linked with fossil fuels. And though these
foundations do fund campaigns that confront big polluters most do not prohibit
their own endowments from being invested with coal and oil. So, for example, the
Ford Foundation, which has supported the Environmental Defense Fund and
Natural Resources Defense Council (and helped support a film that is
accompanying this book), reported in 2013 that it had nearly $14 million in Shell
and BP stocks alone (another multimillion-dollar stock holding is Norway's

Statoil). In North America and Europe, it's virtually impossible to do public
interest work of any scale — in academia or journalism or activism — without taking
money of questionable origin, whether the origin is the state, corporations, or
private philanthropy. And though more accountable grassroots movement
financing models are desperately needed (and crowdfunding is a promising start),
the fact of these financial ties is not what is particularly noteworthy, nor proof of
some nefarious corruption. Where following the financial ties between funders and
public interest work becomes relevant is when there is a compelling reason to
believe that funding is having undue influence — shaping the kinds of research
undertaken, the kinds of policies advanced, as well as the kinds of questions that
get asked in the first place. And since it is generally accepted that fossil fuel money
and conservative foundations have shaped the climate change denial movement, it
seems fair to ask whether fossil fuel money and the values of centrist foundations
have shaped parts of the movement that are in the business of proposing solutions.
And there is a good deal of evidence that these ties have indeed had a decisive
influence.

The big, corporate-affiliated green groups don't deny the reality of climate
change, of course — many work hard to raise the alarm. And yet several of these
groups have consistently, and aggressively, pushed responses to climate change
that are the least burdensome, and often directly beneficial, to the largest
greenhouse gas emitters on the planet — even when the policies come at the direct
expense of communities fighting to keep fossil fuels in the ground. Rather than
advancing policies that treat greenhouse gases as dangerous pollutants demanding
clear, enforceable regulations that would restrict emissions and create the

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conditions for a full transition to renewables, these groups have pushed convoluted
market-based schemes that have treated greenhouse gases as late-capitalist
abstractions to be traded, bundled, speculated upon, and moved around the globe
like currency or subprime debt. And many of these same groups have championed
one of the main fossil fuels — natural gas — as a supposed solution to climate
change, despite mounting evidence that in the coming decades, the methane it
releases, particularly through the fracking process, has the potential to help lock us
into catastrophic levels of warming (as explained in chapter four). In some cases,
large foundations have collaborated to explicitly direct the U.S. green movement
toward these policies. Most infamously within the movement, a 2007 road map
titled "Design to Win: Philanthropy's Role in the Fight Against Global
Warming" — which was sponsored by six large foundations — advocated carbon
trading as a response to climate change and supported both natural gas and
expanded nuclear power. And as these policies were being turned into political
campaigns, the message sent to green groups was essentially "step in line, or else
you're not going to get your share of the money," recalls Jigar Shah, a renowned
solar entrepreneur, former Greenpeace USA board member, and one-time director

of the industry-focused Carbon War Room.

The "market-based" climate solutions favored by so many large foundations and
adopted by many greens have provided an invaluable service to the fossil fuel
sector as a whole. For one, they succeeded in taking what began as a
straightforward debate about shifting away from fossil fuels and put it through a
jargon generator so convoluted that the entire climate issue came to seem too
complex and arcane for nonexperts to understand, seriously undercutting the
potential to build a mass movement capable of taking on powerful polluters. As
Drexel University sociologist Robert Brulle has observed, "The movement to
technical and market-based analyses as the core of reform environmentalism
gutted whatever progressive vision"the movement had previously held. "Rather
than engaging the broader public, reform environmentalism focuses debate among
experts in the scientific, legal, and economic communities. It may provide
technical solutions to specific problems but it neglects the larger social dynamics

that underlie environmental degradation."

These policies have also fed the false perception that a full transition to
renewable energy is technically impossible — since if it were possible, why would
all these well-meaning green groups be spending so much of their time pushing
trading schemes and singing the praises of natural gas, even when extracted
through the ecologically destructive method of fracking?

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Often these compromises are rationalized according to the theory of "low-
hanging fruit." This strategy holds, in essence, that it's hard and expensive to try
to convince politicians to regulate and discipline the most powerful corporations
in the world. So rather than pick that very tough fight, it's wiser and more effective
to begin with something easier. Asking consumers to buy a more expensive, less
toxic laundry detergent, for instance. Making cars more fuel-efficient. Switching
to a supposedly cleaner fossil fuel. Paying an Indigenous tribe to stop logging a
forest in Papua New Guinea to offset the emissions of a coal plant that gets to stay
open in Ohio. With emissions up by about 57 percent since the U.N. climate
convention was signed in 1992, the failure of this polite strategy is beyond debate.
And yet still, at the upper echelons of the climate movement, our soaring emissions
are never blamed on anything as concrete as the fossil fuel corporations that work
furiously to block all serious attempts to regulate emissions, and certainly not on
the economic model that demands that these companies put profit before the health
of the natural systems upon which all life depends. Rather the villains are always
vague and unthreatening — a lack of "political will," a deficit of "ambition" — while
fossil fuel executives are welcomed at U.N. climate summits as key "partners" in

the quest for "climate solutions."

This upside-down world reached new levels of absurdity in November 2013 at
the annual U.N. climate summit held in Warsaw, Poland. The gathering was
sponsored by a panoply of fossil fuel companies, including a major miner of lignite
coal, while the Polish government hosted a parallel "Coal & Climate
Summit," which held up the dirtiest of all the fossil fuels as part of the battle against
global warming. The official U.N. climate negotiation process gave its tacit
endorsement of the coal event when its highest official — Christiana Figueres,
executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate
Change — agreed to deliver a keynote address to the gathering, defying calls from
activists to boycott. "The summit's focus on continued reliance on coal is directly
counter to the goal of these climate negotiations," said Alden Meyer of the Union
of Concerned Scientists, "which is to dramatically reduce emissions of heat-

trapping gases in order to avoid the worst impacts of climate change."

A great many progressives have opted out of the climate change debate in part
because they thought that the Big Green groups, flush with philanthropic dollars,
had this issue covered. That, it turns out, was a grave mistake. To understand why,
it's necessary to return, once again, to the epic case of bad historical timing that
has plagued this crisis since the late eighties.

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The Golden Age of Environmental Law

I. F. Stone may have thought that environmentalism was distracting the youth of
the 1960s and early 1970s from more urgent battles, but by today's standards, the
environmentalists of that era look like fire-breathing radicals. Galvanized by the
1962 publication of Silent Spring and the 1969 Santa Barbara oil spill (the
Deep water Horizon disaster of its day), they launched a new kind of North
American environmentalism, one far more confrontational than the gentlemen's
conservationism of the past.

In addition to the newly formed Friends of the Earth (created in 1969) and
Greenpeace (launched in 1971), the movement also included groups like the
Environmental Defense Fund, then an idealistic gang of scrappy scientists and
lawyers determined to heed Rachel Carson's warnings. The group's unofficial
slogan was, "Sue the bastards," and so they did. The EDF fought for and filed the
original lawsuit that led to the U.S. ban on DDT as an insecticide, resulting in the

revival of many species of birds, including the bald eagle.

This was a time when intervening directly in the market to prevent harm was
still regarded as a sensible policy option. Confronted with unassailable evidence
of a grave collective problem, politicians across the political spectrum still asked
themselves: "What can we do to stop it?" (Not: "How can we develop complex
financial mechanisms to help the market fix it for us?")

What followed was a wave of environmental victories unimaginable by today's
antigovernment standards. In the United States, the legislative legacy is
particularly striking: the Clean Air Act (1963), the Wilderness Act (1964), the
Water Quality Act (1965), the Air Quality Act (1967), the Wild and Scenic Rivers
Act (1968), the National Environmental Policy Act (1970), the revised Clean Air
Act (1970), the Occupational Safety and Health Act (1970), the Clean Water Act

(1972) , the Marine Mammal Protection Act (1972), the Endangered Species Act

(1973) , the Safe Drinking Water Act (1974), the Toxic Substances Control Act
(1976), the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (1976). In all, twenty-three
federal environmental acts became law over the course of the 1970s alone,
culminating in the Superfund Act in 1980, which required industry, through a small
levy, to pay the cost of cleaning up areas that had become toxic.

These victories spilled over into Canada, which was also experiencing a flurry
of environmental activism. The federal government passed its own Water Act
(1970) and Clean Air Act (1971), and gave teeth to the nineteenth-century
Fisheries Act a few years later, turning it into a powerful force for combating
marine pollution and protecting habitats. Meanwhile, the European Community

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declared environmental protection a top priority as early as 1972, laying the
groundwork for its leadership in environmental law in the decades to follow. And
in the wake of the U.N. Conference on the Human Environment in Stockholm that
same year, the 1970s became a foundational decade for international
environmental law, producing such landmarks as the Convention on the Prevention
of Marine Pollution by Dumping of Wastes and Other Matter (1972), the
Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora
(1973), and the Convention on Long-Range Transboundary Air Pollution (1979).

Although robust environmental law would not begin to take hold in much of the
developing world for another decade or so, direct environmental defense also
intensified in the 1970s among peasant, fishing, and Indigenous communities
across the Global South — the origins of what economist Joan Martinez Alier and
others have described as the "environmentalism of the poor." This stretched from
creative, women-led campaigns against deforestation in India and Kenya, to
widespread resistance to nuclear power plants, dams, and other forms of industrial

development in Brazil, Colombia, and Mexico.

Simple principles governed this golden age of environmental legislation: ban or
severely limit the offending activity or substance and where possible, get the
polluter to pay for the cleanup. As journalist Mark Dowie outlines in his history of
the U.S. environmental movement, Losing Ground, the real-world results of this
approach were concrete and measurable. "Tens of millions of acres have been
added to the federal wilderness system, environmental impact assessments are now
required for all major developments, some lakes that were declared dead are living
again.... Lead particulates have been impressively reduced in the atmosphere;
DDT is no longer found in American body fat, which also contains considerably
fewer polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) than it once did. Mercury has virtually
disappeared from Great Lakes sediment; and Strontium 90 is no longer found in
either cows' milk or mothers' milk." And Dowie stressed: "What all these facts
have in common is that they are the result of outright bans against the use or

*27

production of the substances in question."

These are the tough tools with which the environmental movement won its
greatest string of victories. But with that success came some rather significant
changes. For a great many groups, the work of environmentalism stopped being
about organizing protests and teach-ins and became about drafting laws, then suing
corporations for violating them, as well as challenging governments for failing to
enforce them. In rapid fashion, what had been a rabble of hippies became a
movement of lawyers, lobbyists, and U.N. summit hoppers. As a result, many of

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these newly professional environmentalists came to pride themselves on being the
ultimate insiders, able to wheel and deal across the political spectrum. And so long
as the victories kept coming, their insider strategy seemed to be working. Then
came the 1980s. "A tree is a tree," Ronald Reagan famously said in the midst of a
pitched battle over logging rights. "How many more do you need to look at?" With
Reagan's arrival in the White House, and the ascendency of many think-tank
ideologues to powerful positions in his administration, the goalposts were yanked
to the right. Reagan filled his inner circle with pro-industry scientists who denied
the reality of every environmental ill from acid rain to climate change. And
seemingly overnight, banning and tightly regulating harmful industrial practices
went from being bipartisan political practice to a symptom of "command and
control environmentalism." Using messaging that would have fit right in at a
Heartland conference three decades later, James Watt, Reagan's much despised
interior secretary, accused greens of using environmental fears "as a tool to achieve
a greater objective," which he claimed was "centralized planning and control of
the society." Watt also warned darkly about where that could lead: "Look what
happened to Germany in the 1930s. The dignity of man was subordinated to the
powers of Nazism. The dignity of man was subordinated in Russia. Those are the

forces that this thing can evolve into."

For the Big Green groups, all this came as a rude surprise. Suddenly they were
on the outside looking in, being red-baited by the kinds of people with whom they
used to have drinks. Worse, the movement's core beliefs about the need to respond
to environmental threats by firmly regulating corporations were being casually cast
into the dustbin of history. What was an insider environmentalist to do?

Extreme 1980s Makeover

There were options, as there always are. The greens could have joined coalitions
of unions, civil rights groups, and pensioners who were also facing attacks on hard-
won gains, forming a united front against the public sector cutbacks and
deregulation that was hurting them all. And they could have kept aggressively
using the courts to sue the bastards. There was, throughout the 1980s, mounting
public concern even among Republicans about Reagan's environmental rollbacks

*29

(which is how Planet Earth ended up on the cover of Time in early 1989).

And some did take up that fight. As Reagan launched a series of attacks on
environmental regulations, there was resistance, especially at the local level, where

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African American communities in particular were facing an aggressive new wave
of toxic dumping. These urgent, health-based struggles eventually coalesced into
the environmental justice movement, which held the First National People of Color
Environmental Leadership Summit in October 1991, a historic gathering that

adopted a set of principles that remains a movement touchstone to this day. At
the national and international levels, groups like Greenpeace continued to engage
in direct action throughout the 1980s, though much of their energy was
understandably focused on the perils of both nuclear energy and weapons.

But many green groups chose a very different strategy. In the 1980s, extreme
free market ideology became the discourse of power, the language that elites were
speaking to one another, even if large parts of the general public remained un-
persuaded. That meant that for the mainstream green movement, confronting the
antigovernment logic of market triumphalism head-on would have meant exiling
themselves to the margins. And many of the big-budget green groups — having
grown comfortable with their access to power and generous support from large,
elite foundations — were unwilling to do that. Gus Speth, who co-founded the
Natural Resources Defense Council and served as a top environmental advisor to
Jimmy Carter during his presidency, described the problem like this: "We didn't
adjust with Reagan. We kept working within a system but we should have tried to

change the system and root causes." (After years in high-level jobs inside the
U.N. system and as a dean of Yale's School of Forestry and Environmental
Studies, Speth has today thrown his lot in with the radicals, getting arrested to
protest the Keystone XL pipeline and co-founding an organization questioning the
logic of economic growth.) Part of what increased the pressure for ideological
conformity in the 1980s was the arrival of several new groups on the environmental
scene, competing for limited philanthropic dollars. These groups pitched
themselves as modern environmentalists for the Reagan era: pro-business, non-
confrontational, and ready to help polish even the most tarnished corporate logos.
"Our approach is one of collaboration, rather than confrontation. We are creative,
entrepreneurial, and partnership-driven. We don't litigate,"explains the
Conservation Fund, founded in 1985. Two years later came Conservation
International, which claims to have "single-handedly redefined conservation"
thanks largely to a philosophy of working "with companies large and small to make

conservation part of their business model."

This open-for-business approach was so adept at attracting big donors and elite
access that many older, more established green groups raced to get with the
agreeable program, taking an "if you can't beat 'em, join 'em" attitude to brazen

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extremes. It was in this period that the Nature Conservancy started loosening its
definition of "preservation" so that conservation lands would eventually
accommodate such dissonant activities as mansion building and oil drilling (laying
the foundation for the group to get in on the drilling action itself). "I used to say
that the only things not allowed on Nature Conservancy reserves were mining and
slavery, and I wasn't sure about the latter," said Kieran Suckling of the Center for

Biological Diversity. "Now I may have to withdraw the former as well."

Indeed the pro-corporate conversion of large parts of the green movement in the
1980s led to deep schisms inside the environmental movement. Some activists
grew so disillusioned with the willingness of the big groups to partner with
polluters that they broke away from the mainstream movement completely. Some
formed more militant, confrontation-oriented groups like Earth First!, whose
members attempted to stop loggers with sabotage and direct action.

The debates, for the most part, took place behind the scenes but on April 23,
1990, they spilled into the headlines. It was the day after Earth Day — at that time
an annual ritual of mass corporate greenwashing — and around one thousand
demonstrators stormed the New York and the Pacific Stock Exchanges to draw
attention to the "institutions responsible for much of the ecological devastation
which is destroying the planet." Members of grassroots groups like the Love Canal
Homeowners Association, the Bhopal Action Resource Group, and the National
Toxics Campaign handed out pamphlets that read in part, "Who is destroying the
earth — are we all equally to blame? No! We say go to the source. We say take it
to Wall Street!" The pamphlets went on: "The polluters would have us believe that
we are all just common travelers on Spaceship Earth, when in fact a few of them

are at the controls, and the rest of us are choking on their exhaust." This
confrontational rhetoric — a foreshadowing of Occupy Wall Street two decades
later, as well as the fossil fuel divestment movement — was an explicit critique of
the corporate infiltration of the green movement. Daniel Finkenthal, a
spokesperson for the anticorporate protests, declared, "Real environmental groups
are disgusted with the corporate buyout of Earth Day," telling one journalist that
sponsors are "spending more money on Earth Day promotion than they are on

actual corporate reform and the environment."

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Climate Policy and the Price of Surrender

Of all the big green groups that underwent pro-business makeovers in the 1980s,
none attracted more acrimony or disappointment than the Environmental Defense
Fund, the once combative organization that had spent its early years translating
Rachel Carson's ideas into action. In the mid-1980s, a young lawyer named Fred
Krupp took the reins of the organization and he was convinced that the group's
"sue the bastards" motto was so out of step with the times that it belonged at a
garage sale next to dog-eared copies of The Limits to Growth. Under Krupp' s
leadership, which continues to this day, the EDF's new goal became: "creating
markets for the bastards," as his colleague Eric Pooley would later characterize

it. - And it was this transformation, more than any other, that produced a
mainstream climate movement that ultimately found it entirely appropriate to have
coal and oil companies sponsor their most important summits, while investing their
own wealth with these same players.

The new era was officially inaugurated on November 20, 1986, when Krupp
published a cocky op-ed in The Wall Street Journal. In it he announced that a new
generation of pro-business environmentalists had arrived and with it "a new
strategy in the movement." Krupp explained that his generation rejected the old-
fashioned idea that "either the industrial economy wins or the environment wins,
with one side's gain being the other's loss. The new environmentalism does not
accept 'either-or' as inevitable and has shown that in many critical instances it is a
fallacy." Rather than attempting to ban harmful activities, as Krupp' s own
organization had helped to do with DDT, the EDF would now form partnerships
with polluters — or "coalitions of former enemies" — and persuade them that there
are cost savings as well as new markets in going green. In time, Walmart,
McDonald's, FedEx, and AT&T would all enjoy high-profile partnerships

with this storied environmental pioneer.

The group prided itself on putting "results" above ideology, but in truth Krupp' s
EDF was highly ideological — it's just that its ideology was the pro-corporate
groupthink of the day, one that holds that private, market-based solutions are
inherently superior to simple regulatory ones. A turning point came in 1988 when
George H. W. Bush came to power promising action on acid rain. The old way of
addressing the problem would have been straightforward: since sulfur dioxide
emissions were the primary cause of acid rain, the solution would have been to
require their reduction by a fixed amount across the board. Instead, the EDF pushed
for the first full-fledged cap-and-trade system. These rules did not tell polluters
that they had to cut their sulfur emissions but, instead, set a nationwide cap on

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sulfur dioxide, beneath which big emitters like coal-fired power plants could do as
they pleased — pay other companies to make reductions for them, purchase
allowances permitting them to pollute as much as they had before, or make a profit

by selling whatever permits they didn't use.

The new approach worked and it was popular among foundations and private
donors, particularly on Wall Street, where financiers were understandably attracted
to the idea of harnessing the profit motive to solve environmental ills. Under
Krupp's leadership, the EDF's annual budget expanded from $3 million to roughly
$120 million. Julian Robertson, founder of the hedge fund Tiger Management,
underwrote the EDF's work to the tune of $40 million, a staggering sum for a

*39

single benefactor. The Environmental Defense Fund has always insisted that it
does not take donations from the companies with which it forms partnerships —
that, writes EDF senior vice president for strategy and communications Eric
Pooley, "would undermine our independence and integrity." But the policy doesn't
bear much scrutiny. For instance, one of the EDF's flagship partnerships is with
Walmart, with whom it collaborates to "make the company more sustainable." And
it's true that Walmart doesn't donate to the EDF directly. However, the Walton
Family Foundation, which is entirely controlled by members of the family that
founded Walmart, gave the EDF $65 million between 2009 and 2013. In 201 1, the
foundation provided the group with nearly 15 percent of its funding. Meanwhile,
Sam Rawlings Walton, grandson of Walmart founder Sam Walton, sits on the
EDF's board of trustees (identified merely as "Boatman, Philanthropist,

Entrepreneur" on the organization's website).

The EDF claims that it "holds Walmart to the same standards we would any
other company." Which, judging by Walmart' s rather dismal environmental record
since this partnership began — from its central role in fueling urban sprawl to its

steadily increasing emissions — is not a very high standard at all.

Nor is the Environmental Defense Fund the only environmental organization to
have benefited from the Walton family's largesse. Their foundation is one of the
top green funders, handing out more than $71 million in grants for environmental
causes in 2011, with about half of the money going to the EDF, Conservation
International, and the Marine Stewardship Council. All have partnerships with
Walmart, whether to lower emissions, stamp an eco label on some of the seafood
the company sells, or to co-launch a line of "mine to market" jewelry. Stacy
Mitchell, a researcher with the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, observes that
having large parts of the green movement so dependent on the scions of a company
that almost singlehandedly supersized the retail sector and exported the model

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around the world has had profound political implications. "Walmart's money is
exerting significant influence in setting the agenda, defining the problems, and
elevating certain kinds of approaches — notably those that reinforce, rather than
challenge, the power of large corporations in our economy and society," she

writes. And this is the heart of the issue — not simply that a group that gets a large
portion of its budget from the Walton family fortune is unlikely to be highly critical
of Walmart. The 1990s was the key decade when the contours of the climate battle
were being drawn — when a collective strategy for rising to the challenge was
developed and when the first wave of supposed solutions was presented to the
public. It was also the period when Big Green became most enthusiastically pro-
corporate, most committed to a low-friction model of social change in which
everything had to be "win-win." And in the same period many of the corporate
partners of groups like the EDF and the Nature Conservancy — Walmart, FedEx,
GM — were pushing hard for the global de-regulatory framework that has done so
much to send emissions soaring.

This alignment of economic interests — combined with the ever powerful desire
to be seen as "serious" in circles where seriousness is equated with toeing the pro-
market line — fundamentally shaped how these green groups conceived of the
climate challenge from the start. Global warming was not defined as a crisis being
fueled by overconsumption, or by high emissions industrial agriculture, or by car
culture, or by a trade system that insists that vast geographical distances do not
matter — root causes that would have demanded changes in how we live, work, eat,
and shop. Instead, climate change was presented as a narrow technical problem
with no end of profitable solutions within the market system, many of which were
available for sale at Walmart.

The effect of this "bounding of the debate," as the Scottish author and
environmentalist Alastair Mcintosh describes it, reaches far beyond a few U.S.
groups. "In my experience," writes Mcintosh, "most international climate change
agency personnel take the view that 'we just can't go there' in terms of the politics
of cutting consumerism." This is usually framed as an optimistic faith in markets,
but in fact it "actually conceals pessimism because it keeps us in the displacement
activity of barking up the wrong tree. It is an evasion of reality, and with it, the
need to fundamentally appraise the human condition in order to seek the roots of

hope." Put another way, the refusal of so many environmentalists to consider
responses to the climate crisis that would upend the economic status quo forces
them to place their hopes in solutions — whether miracle products, or carbon
markets, or "bridge fuels" — that are either so weak or so high-risk that entrusting

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them with our collective safety constitutes what can only be described as magical
thinking. I do not question the desire on the part of these self-styled pragmatists to
protect the earth from catastrophic warming. But between the Heartlanders who
recognize that climate change is a profound threat to our economic and social
systems and therefore deny its scientific reality, and those who claim climate
change requires only minor tweaks to business-as-usual and therefore allow
themselves to believe in its reality, it's not clear who is more deluded.

Shopping Our Way Out of It

For a few years around the 2006 release of Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth, it
seemed as if climate change was finally going to inspire the transformative
movement of our era. Public belief in the problem was high, and the issue seemed
to be everywhere. Yet on looking back on that period, what is strange is that all the
energy seemed to be coming from the very top tier of society. In the first decade
of the new millennium, climate talk was a strikingly elite affair, the stuff of Davos
panels and gee-whiz TED Talks, of special green issues of Vanity Fair and
celebrities arriving at the Academy Awards in hybrid cars. And yet behind the
spectacle, there was virtually no discernible movement, at least not of the sort that
anyone involved in the civil rights, antiwar, or women's movements would
recognize. There were few mass marches, almost no direct action beyond the
occasional media-friendly stunt, and no angry leaders (other than a former vice
president of the United States).

In a sense, the period represented a full-circle return to the gentlemen's
clubhouse in which the conservation movement began, with Sierra Club cofounder
John Muir persuading President Theodore Roosevelt to save large parts of
Yosemite while the two men talked around the bonfire on a camping trip. And
though the head of Conservation International did not go camping on the melting
glaciers with George W. Bush in order toimpress upon him the reality of climate
change, there were plenty of postmodern equivalents, including celebrity- studded
eco-cruises that allowed Fortune 500 CEOs to get a closer look at endangered coral
reefs. It wasn't that there was no role for the public. We were called upon
periodically to write letters, sign petitions, turn off our lights for an hour, make a
giant human hourglass that could be photographed from the sky. And of course we
were always asked to send money to the Big Green groups that were supposedly
just on the cusp of negotiating a solution to climate change on our behalf. But most

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of all, regular, noncelebrity people were called upon to exercise their consumer
power — not by shopping less but by discovering new and exciting ways to
consume more. And if guilt set in, well, we could click on the handy carbon
calculators on any one of dozens of green sites and purchase an offset, and our sins

would instantly be erased.

In addition to not doing much to actually lower emissions, these various
approaches also served to reinforce the very "extrinsic" values that we now know
are the greatest psychological barriers to climate action — from the worship of
wealth and fame for their own sakes to the idea that change is something that is
handed down from above by our betters, rather than something we demand for
ourselves. They may even have played a role in weakening public belief in the
reality of human-caused climate change. Indeed a growing number of
communications specialists now argue that because the "solutions" to climate
change proposed by many green groups in this period were so borderline frivolous,
many people concluded that the groups must have been exaggerating the scale of
the problem. After all, if climate change really was as dire as Al Gore argued it
was in An Inconvenient Truth, wouldn't the environmental movement be asking
the public to do more than switch brands of cleaning liquid, occasionally walk to
work, and send money? Wouldn't they be trying to shut down the fossil fuel
companies?

"Imagine that someone came up with a brilliant new campaign against smoking.
It would show graphic images of people dying of lung cancer followed by the
punch line: 'It's easy to be healthy — smoke one less cigarette a month.' We know
without a moment's reflection that this campaign would fail," wrote British climate
activist and author George Marshall. "The target is so ludicrous, and the
disconnection between the images and the message is so great, that most smokers

would just laugh it off."

It would be one thing if, while individuals were being asked to voluntarily
"green" the minutiae of their lives, the Big Green NGOs had simultaneously gone
after the big polluters, demanding that they match our individual small cuts in
carbon emissions with large-scale, industry-wide reductions. And some did. But
many of the most influential green groups did precisely the opposite. Not only did
they help develop complex financial mechanisms to allow these corporations to
keep emitting, they also actively campaigned to expand the market for one of the
three main fossil fuels.

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Fracking and the Burning Bridge

The gas industry itself came up with the pitch that it could be a "bridge" to a clean
energy future back in the early 1980s. Then in 1988, with climate change
awareness breaking into the mainstream, the American Gas Association began to

explicitly frame its product as a response to the "greenhouse effect."

In 1992, a coalition of progressive groups — including the Natural Resources
Defense Council, Friends of the Earth, Environmental Action, and Public
Citizen — officially embraced the idea, presenting a "Sustainable Energy
Blueprint" to the incoming administration of Bill Clinton that included a
significant role for natural gas. The NRDC was a particularly strong advocate,
going on to call natural gas "the bridge to greater reliance on cleaner and renewable

forms of energy." And at the time, it seemed to make a good deal of sense:
renewable technology was less mature than it is now, and the gas in question was
being extracted through conventional drilling methods. Today, the landscape has
shifted dramatically on both counts. Renewable technologies have become
radically more efficient and affordable, making a full transition to the power they
provide both technologically and economically possible within the next few
decades. The other key change is that the vast majority of new gas projects in North
America rely on hydraulic fracturing — not conventional drilling — and fracking-

based exploration and production are on the rise around the world.

These developments have significantly weakened the climate case for natural
gas — especially fracked natural gas. We now know that fracked natural gas may
leak enough methane to make its warming impact, especially in the near term,
comparable to that of coal. Anthony Ingraffea, who coauthored the breakthrough
Cornell study on methane leakage and describes himself as "a longtime oil and gas
engineer who helped develop shale fracking techniques for the Energy
Department," wrote in The New York Times, "The gas extracted from shale
deposits is not a 'bridge' to a renewable energy future — it's a gangplank to more

warming and away from clean energy investments."

We also know, from experience in the U.S., that cheap and abundant natural gas
doesn't replace only coal but also potential power from renewables. This has led
the Tyndall Centre's Kevin Anderson to conclude, "If we are serious about
avoiding dangerous climate change, the only safe place for shale gas remains in
the ground." Biologist Sandra Steingraber of New Yorkers Against Fracking puts
the stark choice like this: we are "standing at an energy crossroads. One signpost
points to a future powered by digging fossils from the ground and lighting them

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on fire. The other points to renewable energy. You cannot go in both directions at
once. Subsidizing the infrastructure for one creates disincentives for the other."

Even more critically, many experts are convinced that we do not need
unconventional fuels like fracked gas to make a full transition to renew ables. Mark
Z. Jacobson, the Stanford engineering professor who coauthored the road map for
reaching 100 percent renewable energy by 2030, says that conventional fossil fuels
can power the transition and keep the lights on in the meantime. "We don't need
unconventional fuels to produce the infrastructure to convert to entirely clean and
renewable wind, water, and solar power for all purposes. We can rely on the
existing infrastructure plus the new infrastructure [of renewable generation] to
provide the energy for producing the rest of the clean infrastructure that we'll
need," he said in an interview, adding, "Conventional oil and gas is much more
than enough." How have the Big Green groups responded to this new
information? Some, like the NRDC, have cooled off from their earlier support,
acknowledging the risks and pushing for tougher regulations while still advocating
natural gas as a replacement for coal and other dirty fuels. But others have chosen
to dig in even deeper. The Environmental Defense Fund and the Nature
Conservancy, for example, have responded to revelations about the huge risks
associated with natural gas by undertaking a series of initiatives that give the
distinct impression that fracking is on the cusp of becoming clean and safe. And
as usual, much of the funding for this work has strong links to the fossil fuel sector.

The Nature Conservancy, for its part, has received hundreds of thousands of
dollars from JP Morgan to come up with voluntary rules for fracking. JP Morgan,
unsurprisingly, is a leading financier of the industry, with at least a hundred major
clients who frack, according to the bank's top environmental executive, Matthew
Arnold. ("We are number one or number two in any given year in the oil and gas
industry worldwide," Arnold told 77^ Guardian in February 2013.) The
conservancy also has a high-profile partnership with BP in Wyoming's Jonah
Field, a huge fracking-for-gas operation in an area rich with vulnerable wildlife.
The Nature Conservancy's job has been to identify habitat preservation and
conservation projects to "offset the impacts of oil and gas drilling pads and
infrastructure." From a climate change perspective, this is an absurd proposition,
since these projects have no hope of offsetting the most damaging impact of all:
the release of heat-trapping gases into the atmosphere. Which is why the most
important preservation work that any environmental group can do is preserving the
carbon in the ground, wherever it is. (Then again, this is The Nature Conservancy,

which has its very own gas well in the middle of a nature preserve in Texas).

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Similarly, the EDF has teamed up with several large energy companies to open
the Center for Sustainable Shale Development (CSSD) — and as many have pointed
out, the very name of the center makes it clear that it will not be questioning
whether "sustainable" extraction of fossil fuels from shale is possible in the age of
climate change. The center has advanced a set of voluntary industry standards that
its members claim will gradually make fracking safer. But as then-Demos senior
policy analyst J. Mijin Cha pointed out, "The Center's new standards ... are not
enforceable. If anything, they provide cover for oil and gas interests that want to

derail the transition to a clean economy powered by renewable energy."

One of the center's key funders is the Heinz Endowments, which as it turns out,
was no disinterested party. A June 2013 investigation by the Public Accountability
Initiative reported that, "The Heinz Endowments, has significant, undisclosed ties
to the natural gas industry.... Heinz Endowments president Robert F. Vagt is
currently a director at Kinder Morgan, a natural gas pipeline company, and owns
more than $1.2 million in company stock. This is not disclosed on the Heinz
Endowments website or the website of CSSD, where Vagt serves as a director.
Kinder Morgan has cited increased regulation of fracking as a key business risk in
recent corporate filings." (After the controversy broke, Heinz Endowments
appeared to move away from some of its earlier pro-gas positions and went through
a significant staffing shakeup, including the resignation of Vagt as foundation

president in early 2014.)

The EDF has also received a $6 million grant from the foundation of New York' s
billionaire ex-mayor Michael Bloomberg (who is strongly pro-fracking),
specifically to develop and secure regulations intended to make fracking safe —
once again, not to impartially assess whether such an outcome is even possible.
And Bloomerg is no impartial observer in all this. The former mayor's personal
and philanthropic fortune — worth over $30 billion — is managed by investment
firm Willett Advisors, which was established by Bloomberg and his associates.
According to Bloomberg Businessweek, and confirmed by Bloomberg
Philanthropies (which shares a building with the firm), Willett "invests in real
assets focusing on oil and natural gas areas." Michael Bloomberg did not respond
to repeated requests for comment. The EDF has done more than help the fracking
industry appear to be taking environmental concerns seriously. It also led research
that has been used to counter claims that high methane leakage disqualifies fracked
natural gas as a climate solution. The EDF has partnered with Shell, Chevron, and
other top energy companies on one in a series of studies on methane leaks with the
clear goal, as one EDF official put it, of helping "natural gas to be an accepted part

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of a strategy for improving energy security and moving to a clean energy future."
When the first study arrived in September 2013, published in Proceedings of the
National Academy of Sciences, it made news by identifying fugitive methane
leakage rates from gas extraction that were ten to twenty times lower than those in
most other studies to date.~

But the study's design contained serious limitations, the most glaring of which
was allowing the gas companies to choose the wells they wanted inspected. Robert
Howarth, the lead author of the breakthrough 2011 Cornell study on the same
subject, pointed out that the EDF's findings were "based only on evaluation of
sites and times chosen by industry," and that the paper "must be viewed as a best-
case scenario," rather than a reflection of how the industry functions as a whole.
He added, "The gas industry can produce gas with relatively low emissions, but
they very often do not do so. They do better when they know they are being
carefully watched." These concerns, however, were entirely upstaged by the
priceless headlines inspired by the Environmental Defense Fund study: "Study:
Leaks at Natural Gas Wells Less Than Previously Thought" (Time); "Study:
Methane Leaks from Gas Drilling Not Huge" (Associated Press); 'Tracking

Methane Fears Overdone" (The Australian); and so on.

The result of all this has been a great deal of public uncertainty. Is fracking safe
after all? Is it about to become safe? Is it clean or dirty? Like the well-understood
strategy of sowing doubts about the science of climate change, this confusion
effectively undermines the momentum away from fossil fuels and toward
renewable energy. As Josh Fox, the director of the Academy Award-nominated
documentary on fracking, Gasland, puts it: "I think that what's happening here is
a squandering of the greatest political will that we've ever had towards getting off

of fossil fuels." Because while green groups battle over the research and
voluntary codes, the gas companies are continuing to drill, leak, and pour billions
of dollars into new infrastructure designed to last for many decades.

Trading in Pollution

When governments began negotiating the international climate treaty that would
become the Kyoto Protocol, there was broad consensus about what the agreement
needed to accomplish. The wealthy, industrialized countries responsible for the
lion's share of historical emissions would have to lead by capping their emissions
at a fixed level and then systematically reducing them. The European Union and

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developing countries assumed that governments would do this by putting in place
strong domestic measures to reduce emissions at home, for example by taxing
carbon, and beginning a shift to renewable energy.

But when the Clinton administration came to the negotiations, it proposed an
alternate route: create a system of international carbon trading modeled on the cap-
and-trade system used to address acid rain (in the runup to Kyoto, the EDF worked

closely on the plan with Al Gore's office). Rather than straightforwardly
requiring all industrialized countries to lower their greenhouse gas emissions by a
fixed amount, the scheme would issue pollution permits, which they could use, sell
if they didn't need them, or purchase so that they could pollute more. National
programs would be set up so that companies could similarly trade these permits,
with the country staying within an overall emissions cap. Meanwhile, projects that
were employing practices that claimed to be keeping carbon out of the
atmosphere — whether by planting trees that sequester carbon, or by producing low
carbon energy, or by upgrading a dirty factory to lower its emissions — could
qualify for carbon credits. These credits could be purchased by polluters and used
to offset their own emissions.

The U.S. government was so enthusiastic about this approach that it made the
inclusion of carbon trading a deal breaker in the Kyoto negotiations. This led to
what France's former environment minister Dominique Voynet described as
"radically antagonistic" conflicts between the United States and Europe, which
saw the creation of a global carbon market as tantamount to abandoning the climate
crisis to "the law of the jungle." Angela Merkel, then Germany's environment
minister, insisted, "The aim cannot be for industrialized countries to satisfy their
obligations solely through emissions trading and profit."

It is one of the great ironies of environmental history that the United States —
after winning this pitched battle at the negotiating table — would fail to ratify the
Kyoto Protocol, and that the most important emissions market would become a
reality in Europe, where it was opposed from the outset. The European Union's
Emissions Trading System (ETS) was launched in 2005 and would go on to
become closely integrated with the United Nations' Clean Development
Mechanism (CDM), which was written into the Kyoto Protocol. At least initially,
the markets seemed to take off. From 2005 through 2010, the World Bank
estimates that the various carbon markets around the globe saw over $500 billion
in trades (though some experts believe those estimates are inflated). Huge numbers
of projects around the world, meanwhile, are generating carbon credits — the CDM
alone had an estimated seven-thousand-plus registered projects in early 2014.~

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But it didn't take long for the flaws in the plan to show. Under the U.N. system,
all kinds of dodgy industrial projects can generate lucrative credits. For instance,
oil companies operating in the Niger Delta that practice "flaring" — setting fire to
the natural gas released in the oil drilling process because capturing and using the
potent greenhouse gas is more expensive than burning it — have argued that they
should be paid if they stop engaging in this enormously destructive practice. And
indeed some are already registered to receive carbon credits under the U.N. system
for no longer flaring — despite the fact that gas flaring has been illegal in Nigeria

since 1984 (it's a law filled with holes and is largely ignored). Even a highly
polluting factory that installs a piece of equipment that keeps a greenhouse gas out
of the atmosphere can qualify as "green development" under U.N. rules. And this,
in turn, is used to justify more dirty emissions somewhere else.

The most embarrassing controversy for defenders of this model involves coolant
factories in India and China that emit the highly potent greenhouse gas HFC-23 as
a by-product. By installing relatively inexpensive equipment to destroy the gas
(with a plasma torch, for example) rather than venting it into the air, these
factories — most of which produce gases used for air-conditioning and
refrigeration — have generated tens of millions of dollars in emission credits every
year. The scheme is so lucrative, in fact, that it has triggered a series of perverse
incentives: in some cases, companies can earn twice as much by destroying an
unintentional by-product as they can from making their primary product, which is
itself emissions intensive. In the most egregious instance of this, selling carbon
credits constituted a jaw-dropping 93.4 percent of one Indian firm's total revenues
in 2012.-

According to one group that petitioned the U.N. to change its policies on HFC-
23 projects, there is "overwhelming evidence that manufacturers are gaming" the
system "by producing more potent greenhouse gases just so they can get paid to

destroy them." But it gets worse: the primary product made by these factories is
a type of coolant that is so damaging to the ozone that it is being phased out under
the Montreal Protocol on ozone depletion.

And this is not some marginal piece of the world emissions market — as of 2012,
the U.N. system awarded these coolant manufacturers its largest share of emission
credits, more than any genuinely clean energy projects. Since then, the U.N. has
enacted some partial reforms, and the European Union has banned credits from
these factories in its carbon market.

It should hardly be surprising that so many questionable offset projects have
come to dominate the emissions market. The prospect of getting paid real money

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based on projections of how much of an invisible substance is kept out of the air
tends to be something of a scam magnet. And the carbon market has attracted a
truly impressive array of grifters and hustlers who scour biologically rich but
economically poor nations like Papua New Guinea, Ecuador, and Congo, often
preying on the isolation of Indigenous people whose forests can be classified as
offsets. These carbon cowboys, as they have come to be called, arrive bearing
aggressive contracts (often written in English, with no translation) in which large
swaths of territory are handed over to conservation groups on the promise of
money for nothing. In the bush of Papua New Guinea, carbon deals are known as
"sky money"; in Madagascar, where the promised wealth has proved as ephemeral
as the product being traded, the Betsimisaraka people talk of strangers who are
"selling the wind."~

A notorious carbon cowboy is Australian David Nilsson, who runs a particularly
fly-by-night operation; in one recent incarnation, his carbon credit enterprise
reportedly consisted only of an answering service and a web domain. After Nilsson
tried to convince the Matses people in Peru to sign away their land rights in
exchange for promises of billions in revenues from carbon credits, a coalition of
Indigenous people in the Amazon Basin called for Nilsson to be expelled from the
country. And they alleged that Nilsson' s pitch was "similar to 100 other carbon
projects" which were "dividing our people with non-existent illusions of being
millionaires." Some Indigenous leaders even say that it is easier to deal with big
oil and mining companies, because at least people understand who these
companies are and what they want; less so when the organization after your land
is a virtuous- seeming NGO and the product it is trying to purchase is something
that cannot be seen or touched.^

This points to a broader problem with offsets, one that reaches beyond the
official trading systems and into a web of voluntary arrangements administered by
large conservation groups in order to unofficially "offset" the emissions of big
polluters. Particularly in the early days of offsetting, after forest conservation
projects began appearing in the late 1980s and early 1990s, by far the most
persistent controversy was that — in the effort to quantify and control how much
carbon was being stored so as to assign a monetary value to the standing trees —
the people who live in or near those forests were sometimes pushed onto
reservation-like parcels, locked out of their previous ways of life.~ This locking
out could be literal, complete with fences and armed men patrolling the territory
looking for trespassers. The NGOs claim that they were merely attempting to

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protect the resources and the carbon they represented, but all this was seen, quite
understandably, as a form of land grabbing.

For instance, in Parana, Brazil, at a project providing offsets for Chevron, GM,
and American Electric Power and administered by The Nature Conservancy and a
Brazilian NGO, Indigenous Guarani were not allowed to forage for wood or hunt
in the places they'd always occupied, or even fish in nearby waterways. As one
local put it, "They want to take our home from us." Cressant Rakotomanga,
president of a community organization in Madagascar where the Wildlife
Conservation Society is running an offset program, expressed a similar sentiment.
"People are frustrated because before the project, they were completely free to

hunt, fish and cut down the forests."

Indeed the offset market has created a new class of "green" human rights abuses,
wherein peasants and Indigenous people who venture into their traditional
territories (reclassified as carbon sinks) in order to harvest plants, wood, or fish are
harassed or worse. There is no comprehensive data available about these abuses,
but the reported incidents are piling up. Near Guaraquecaba, Brazil, locals have
reported being shot at by park rangers while they searched the forest for food and
plants inside the Parana offset project hosted by The Nature Conservancy. "They
don't want human beings in the forest," one farmer told the investigative journalist
Mark Schapiro. And in a carbon-offset tree-planting project in Uganda's Mount
Elgon National Park and Kibale National Park, run by a Dutch organization,
villagers described a similar pattern of being fired upon and having their crops
uprooted.

In the wake of such reports, some of the green groups involved in offsetting now
stress their dedication to Indigenous rights. However, dissatisfaction remains and
controversies continue to crop up. For example, in the Bajo Aguan region of
Honduras, some owners of palm oil plantations have been able to register a carbon
offset project that claims to capture methane. Spurred by the promise of cash for
captured gas, sprawling tree farms have displaced local agriculture, leading to a
violent cycle of land occupations and evictions that has left as many as a hundred
local farmers and their advocates dead as of 2013. "The way we see it, it has
become a crime to be a farmer here," says Heriberto Rodriguez of the Unified
Campesino Movement of Aguan, which places part of the blame for the deaths on
the carbon market itself. "Whoever gives the finance to these companies also
becomes complicit in all these deaths. If they cut these funds, the landholders will

feel somewhat pressured to change their methods."

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Though touted as a classic "win-win" climate solution, there are very few
winners in these farms and forests. In order for multinational corporations to
protect their freedom to pollute the atmosphere, peasants, farmers, and Indigenous
people are losing their freedom to live and sustain themselves in peace. When the
Big Green groups refer to offsets as the "low-hanging fruit" of climate action, they
are in fact making a crude cost-benefit analysis that concludes that it's easier to
cordon off a forest inhabited by politically weak people in a poor country than to
stop politically powerful corporate emitters in rich countries — that it's easier to
pick the fruit, in other words, than dig up the roots.

The added irony is that many of the people being sacrificed for the carbon market
are living some of the most sustainable, low-carbon lifestyles on the planet. They
have strong reciprocal relationships with nature, drawing on local ecosystems on
a small scale while caring for and regenerating the land so it continues to provide
for them and their descendants. An environmental movement committed to real
climate solutions would be looking for ways to support these ways of life — not
severing deep traditions of stewardship and pushing more people to become
rootless urban consumers.

Chris Lang, a British environmentalist based in Jakarta who runs an offset
watchdog website called REDD-Monitor, told me that he never thought his job
would involve exposing the failings of the green movement. "I hate the idea of the
environmental movement fighting among itself instead of fighting the oil
companies," he said. "It's just that these groups don't seem to have any desire to
take on the oil companies, and with some of them, I'm not sure they really are

environmentalists at all."

This is not to say that every project being awarded carbon credits is somehow
fraudulent or actively destructive to local ways of life. Wind farms and solar arrays
are being built, and some forests classified as offsets are being preserved. The
problem is that by adopting this model of financing, even the very best green
projects are being made ineffective as climate responses because for every ton of
carbon dioxide the developers keep out of the atmosphere, a corporation in the
industrialized world is able to pump a ton into the air, using offsets to claim the
pollution has been neutralized. One step forward, one step back. At best, we are
running in place. And as we will see, there are other, far more effective ways to
fund green development than the international carbon market.

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Geographer Bram Biischer coined the term "liquid nature" to refer to what these
market mechanisms are doing to the natural world. As he describes it, the trees,
meadows, and mountains lose their intrinsic, place-based meaning and become
deracinated, virtual commodities in a global trading system. The carbon-
sequestering potential of biotic life is virtually poured into polluting industries like
gas into a car's tank, allowing them to keep on emitting. Once absorbed into this
system, a pristine forest may look as lush and alive as ever, but it has actually
become an extension of a dirty power plant on the other side of the planet, attached
by invisible financial transactions. Polluting smoke may not be billowing from the
tops of its trees but it may as well be, since the trees that have been designated as

carbon offsets are now allowing that pollution to take place elsewhere.

The mantra of the early ecologists was "everything is connected" — every tree a
part of an intricate web of life. The mantra of the corporate -partnered
conservationists, in sharp contrast, may as well be "everything is disconnected,"
since they have successfully constructed a new economy in which the tree is not a
tree but rather a carbon sink used by people thousands of miles away to appease
our consciences and maintain our levels of economic growth.

But the biggest problem with this approach is that carbon markets have failed
even on their own terms, as markets. In Europe, the problems began with the
decision to entice companies and countries to join the market by handing out a
huge number of cheap carbon permits. When the economic crisis hit a few years
later, it caused production and consumption to contract and emissions to drop on
their own. That meant the new emissions market was drowning in excess permits,
which in turn caused the price of carbon to drop dramatically (in 2013, a ton of
carbon was trading for less than 04, compared to the target price of 020). That left
little incentive to shift away from dirty energy or to buy carbon credits. Which
helps explain why, in 2012, coal's share of the U.K.'s electricity production rose
by more than 30 percent, while in Germany, as we have already seen, emissions
from coal went up despite the country's rapid embrace of renewable power.
Meanwhile, the United Nations Clean Development Mechanism has fared even
worse: indeed it has "essentially collapsed," in the words of a report commissioned
by the U.N. itself. "Weak emissions targets and the economic downturn in wealthy
nations resulted in a 99 percent decline in carbon credit prices between 2008 and
2013," explains Oscar Reyes, an expert on climate finance at the Institute for

Policy Studies.

This is a particularly extreme example of the boom-and-bust cycle of markets,
which are volatile and high-risk by nature. And that's the central flaw with this so-

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called solution: it is simply too risky, and time is too short, for us to put our
collective fate in such an inconstant and unreliable force. John Kerry has likened
the threat of climate change to a "weapon of mass destruction," and it's a fair

analogy. But if climate change poses risks on par with nuclear war, then why are
we not responding with the seriousness that that comparison implies? Why aren't
we ordering companies to stop putting our future at risk, instead of bribing and
cajoling them? Why are we gambling?

Tired of this time wasting, in February 2013, more than 130 environmental and
economic justice groups called for the abolition of the largest carbon-trading
system in the world, the EU's Emissions Trading System (ETS), in order "to make
room for climate measures that work." The declaration stated that, seven years into
this experiment, "The ETS has not reduced greenhouse gas emissions . . . the worst
polluters have had little to no obligation to cut emissions at source. Indeed, offset
projects have resulted in an increase of emissions worldwide: even conservative
sources estimate that between and of carbon credits bought into the ETS 'do

not represent real carbon reductions.' "

The system has also allowed power companies and others to pass on the cost of
compliance to their consumers, especially in the early years of the market, leading
to a 2008 estimate by Point Carbon of windfall profits between $32 and $99 billion
for electric utilities in the U.K., Germany, Spain, Italy, and Poland over a span of
just five years. One report found airline companies raked in a windfall of up to
$1.8 billion in their first year on the market in 2012. In short, rather than getting
the polluters to pay for the mess they have created — a basic principle of
environmental justice — taxpayers and ratepayers have heaped cash on them and

for a scheme that hasn't even worked.

In the context of the European debacle, the fact that the U.S. Senate failed to pass
climate legislation in 2009 should not be seen, as it often is, as the climate
movement' s greatest defeat, but rather as a narrowly dodged bullet. The cap-and-
trade bills under consideration in the U.S. House and Senate in Obama's first term
would have repeated all the errors of the European and U.N. emission trading
systems, and then added some new ones of their own.

Both laws were based on proposals crafted by a coalition put together by the
Environmental Defense Fund's Fred Krupp, which had brought large polluters
(General Electric, Dow Chemical, Alcoa, ConocoPhillips, BP, Shell, the coal giant
Duke Energy, DuPont, and many more) together with a handful of Big Green

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groups (The Nature Conservancy, the National Wildlife Federation, the Natural
Resources Defense Council, the World Resources Institute, and what was then
called the Pew Center on Global Climate Change). Known as the United States
Climate Action Partnership (USCAP), the coalition had been guided by the
familiar defeatist logic that there is no point trying to take on the big emitters
directly so it's better to try to get them onside with a plan laden with corporate

handouts and loopholes.

The deal that ultimately emerged out of USCAP — touted as a historic
compromise between greens and industry — handed out enough free allowances to
cover 90 percent of emissions from energy utilities, including coal plants, meaning
they could keep on emitting that amount and pay no price at all. "We're not going
to get a better deal," Duke Energy' s then CEO Jim Rogers boasted. "Ninety percent
is terrific." Congressman Rick Boucher, a Democrat representing coal-rich
southwestern Virginia, gushed that the bill had so many giveaways that it "ushered

in a new golden age of coal."

These "free allowances" to burn or trade carbon were, in essence, bribes. As
solar entrepreneur Jigar Shah put it: "When you look at these companies that were
in USCAP, they were not interested in regulating carbon. They were interested in
a huge amount of wealth being transferred to their companies in exchange for their
vote on climate change." Needless to say, a deal that made fossil fuel interests
this happy would have brought us nowhere near the deep cuts to our greenhouse
gas emissions that scientists tell us are required to have a good chance of keeping
warming below 2 degrees Celsius. And yet the green groups in USCAP didn't
merely stand back and let the corporations in a direct conflict of interest write U.S.
climate policy — they actively recruited them to do so.

And the saddest irony in all this pandering is that it still wasn't enough for the
polluters. Working with USCAP to help draft climate legislation was, for many of
the big corporate players who joined the coalition, a hedge. In 2007, when the
coalition was formed, climate legislation looked extremely likely, and these
companies wanted to be sure that whatever bill passed Congress was riddled with
enough loopholes to be essentially meaningless — a classic Beltway strategy. They
also knew that getting behind cap-and-trade was the best way of blocking the
worrying prospect of a newly elected president using the Environmental Protection
Agency (EPA) to put firm limits on the amount of carbon companies could emit.
In fact, Waxman-Markey, the primary piece of climate legislation based on the
coalition's blueprint, specifically barred the EPA from regulating carbon from
many major pollution sources, including coal-fired power plants. Michael Parr,

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senior manager of government affairs at DuPont, summarized the corporate

strategy succinctly: "You're either at the table or on the menu."

The problem for Fred Krupp and his colleagues was that these companies were
sitting at plenty of other tables at the same time. Many continued to be members
of the American Petroleum Institute, the National Association of Manufacturers,
and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce — all of which actively opposed climate
legislation. When Barack Obama took office in January 2009, it looked like the
corporate hard-liners were going to lose. But then, in the summer of 2009, with
USCAP still trying to push cap-and-trade through the U.S. Senate, the political
climate abruptly shifted. The economy was still deeply troubled, Obama' s
popularity was tanking, and a new political force came to centerstage. Flush with
oil money from the Koch brothers and pumped up by Fox News, the Tea Party
stormed town-hall meetings across the country, shouting about how Obama' s
healthcare reform was part of a sinister plan to turn the United States into an
Islamic/Nazi/socialist Utopia. In short order, the president started sending signals

that he was reluctant to pick another major legislative fight.

That's when many of the key corporate members of USCAP began to realize
that they now had a solid chance of scuttling climate legislation altogether.
Caterpillar and BP dropped out of the coalition, as did ConocoPhillips, after having
complained of "unrecoverable costs ... on what is historically a low-margin
business." (ConocoPhillips revenues the year after it left USCAP totaled $66
billion, with a tidy net income of $12.4 billion.) And some of these companies
didn't just leave Krupp' s coalition of "former enemies": by directing their
formidable firepower squarely at the legislation that they had helped craft, they
made it abundantly clear that they had never stopped being its enemies.
ConocoPhillips, for instance, set up a dedicated webpage to encourage visitors
(including its roughly thirty thousand employees) to tell legislators how much they
opposed the climate bill. "Climate change legislation will result in higher direct
energy costs for the typical American family," the site warned, further claiming
(outlandishly) that it "could result in a net loss of more than two million U.S. jobs
each year." As for fellow defector BP, company spokesman Ronnie Chappell
explained, "The lowest-cost option for reducing emissions is the increased use of

natural gas."

In other words, thinking they were playing a savvy inside game, Big Green was
outmaneuvered on a grand scale. The environmentalists who participated in
USCAP disastrously misread the political landscape. They chose a stunningly
convoluted approach to tackling climate change, one that would have blocked far

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more effective strategies, specifically because it was more appealing to big
emitters — only to discover that the most appealing climate policy to polluters
remained none at all. Worse, once their corporate partners fled the coalition, they
had no shortage of ammo to fire at their former friends. The climate bill was a
boondoggle, they claimed (it was), filled with handouts and subsidies (absolutely),
and it would pass on higher energy costs to cash-strapped consumers (likely). To
top it all off, as pro-oil Republican congressman Joe Barton put it, "The
environmental benefit is nonexistent" (as the left flank of the green movement had
been saying all along).

It was a classic double-cross, and it worked. In January 2010, the climate
legislation modeled on USCAP's proposals died in the Senate, as it deserved to —

but not before it discredited the very idea of climate action in the minds of many.

Plenty of postmortems have been written about what the greens did wrong in the
cap-and-trade fight but the hardest hitting came in a scathing report by Harvard
University sociologist Theda Skocpol. She concluded that a major barrier to
success was the absence of a mass movement applying pressure from below. "To
counter fierce political opposition, reformers will have to build organizational
networks across the country, and they will need to orchestrate sustained political
efforts that stretch far beyond friendly Congressional offices, comfy boardrooms,
and posh retreats."^ As we will see, a resurgent grassroots climate movement has
now arrived that is doing precisely that — and it is winning a series of startling
victories against the fossil fuel sector as a result.

But old habits die hard. When the cap-and-trade fight in the U.S. Congress was
finally over, with around half a billion dollars spent pushing the policy (ultimately
down the drain), the man who led the pro-business revolution in the green
movement offered his version of what went wrong. Fred Krupp — in a sharp gray
suit, his well- styled hair now white after two and a half decades leading the
Environmental Defense Fund — explained that climate legislation had failed
because greens had been too hard-line, too "shrill," and needed to be more

"humble" and more bipartisan. In other words, compromise some more, tone it
down even further, assert ideas with less confidence, and try to be even more
palatable to their opponents. Never mind that that is precisely what groups like
EDF have been doing since Reagan.

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Fittingly enough, Krupp chose to share these pearls of wisdom during the annual
Brainstorm Green session hosted by Fortune, a magazine devoted to the

celebration of wealth, and sponsored by, among others, Shell Oil.

~ By 2011, the situation had become so surreal that Conservation International (CI) was the target of an
embarrassing prank. A couple of activist/journalists posed as executives of the weapons giant Lockheed
Martin and told the director of corporate relations for CI that they were looking for help greening their
company's image. Rather than cutting their emissions, they said they were thinking of sponsoring an
endangered species. Without missing a beat, the CI representative was recorded helpfully suggesting a bird
of prey, to make the "link with aviation." ("We do not help companies with their image," CI later
maintained, stressing that Lockheed would have needed to undergo a "due diligence process.")

~ After my article on the subject appeared in The Nation, The Nature Conservancy adopted a policy to
"divest from companies that derive a significant percentage of their revenue from fossil fuels with the
highest carbon content and will support a shift to carbon-free energy in the longer term."

~ It's worth keeping this history in mind when free market ideologues treat a cleaner environment as a
natural stage in capitalist development. In fact it is the result of specific sets of regulations, ones that run
directly counter to hard-right ideology.

" By the end of the 1980s, the majority of self-identified Republicans were telling pollsters that they thought
there was "too little" spent protecting the environment. By 1990, the percentage of Republicans who agreed
with that statement topped 70 percent.

" Indeed the worlds of finance and Big Green would become so entangled in the years to come — between
donations, board members, and partnerships — that when The Nature Conservancy needed a new CEO in
2008, it recruited not from within the nonprofit world but from Goldman Sachs. Its current director, Mark
Tercek, had been working at the notorious investment bank for some twenty-five years before moving over
to the NGO, where he has consistently advanced a model of conservation based on bringing ever more parts
of the natural world into the market.

" This is one of the many ironies of the Heartlanders' claim that greens are closet socialists. If so, then they
are deep in the closet. In reality, many mainstream environmentalists bristle at the suggestion that they are
part of the left at all, fearing (correctly) that such an identification would hurt their chances with foundation
funders and corporate donors. Far from using climate change as a tool to alter the American way of life,
many of the large environmental organizations spend their days doing everything in their power to furiously
protect that way of life, at the direct expense of demanding the levels of change required by science.

" The Nature Conservancy, ever the envelope pusher, has been particularly enthusiastic in this regard, hiring
its chief marketing officer straight from World Wrestling Entertainment and participating in the marketing
frenzy that accompanied the release of Universal Pictures' film version of The Lorax (which used Dr.
Seuss's anti-consumerism classic to hawk IHOP pancakes and Mazda SUVs). In 2012, the conservancy
managed to outrage many of its female staffers by partnering with the online luxury goods retailer Gilt to
promote the Sports IllustratedSwimsuit Edition (the magazine explained that "whether you decide to buy a
bikini, surfboards or tickets to celebrate at our parties, any money you spend . . . will help The Nature
Conservancy ensure we have beaches to shoot Swimsuit on for another half-century").

" Interestingly, before Nilsson got into the carbon game, he was investigated by a member of Queensland's
parliament for selling what appeared to be entirely fictional Australian real estate to unlucky marks in none
other than Nauru.

" Heartland regular Chris Horner called the bill "crony capitalism" on the Enron model — and Horner should
know, because he used to work there.

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NO MESSIAHS

The Green Billionaires Won't Save Us

"I had always got away with breaking rules and thought this was no
different. I would have got away with it as well if I hadn't been greedy."

-Richard Branson, on getting caught dodging taxes in the early 1970s 1

"You gotta lead from the front. Nobody is going to start it from the
grassroots."

-Former New York mayor Michael Bloomberg, 2013

In his autobiography/New Age business manifesto Screw It, Let's Do It, Richard
Branson, the flamboyant founder of Virgin Group, shared the inside story of what
he describes as his "Road to Damascus" conversion to the fight against climate
change. It was 2006 and Al Gore, on tour with An Inconvenient Truth, came to the
billionaire' s home to impress upon him the dangers of global warming, and to try

to convince Branson to use Virgin Airlines as a catalyst for change."

"It was quite an experience having a brilliant communicator like Al Gore give
me a personal PowerPoint presentation," Branson writes of the meeting. "Not only
was it one of the best presentations I have ever seen in my life, but it was
profoundly disturbing to become aware that we are potentially facing the end of
the world as we know it. . . . As I sat there and listened to Gore, I saw that we were

looking at Armageddon."

As he tells it, Branson's first move following his terrifying epiphany was to
summon Will Whitehorn, then Virgin Group's corporate and brand development
director. Together "we carefully discussed these issues and took the decision to
change the way Virgin operates on a corporate and global level. We called this
new Virgin approach to business Gaia Capitalism in honor of James Lovelock and

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his revolutionary scientific view" (a reference to Lovelock's theory that the earth
is "one single enormous living organism and every single part of the ecosystem
reacted with every other part"). Not only would Gaia Capitalism "help Virgin to
make a real difference in the next decade and not be ashamed to make money at
the same time," but Branson believed it held the potential to become "a new way
of doing business on a global level.""

Before the year was out, he was ready to make his grand entrance onto the green
scene (and Branson knows how to make an entrance — by parachute, by hot air
balloon, by Jet Ski, by kite-sail with a naked model clinging to his back . . .). At the
2006 Clinton Global Initiative annual meeting in New York City — the highest
power event on the philanthropic calendar — Branson pledged to spend roughly $3
billion over the next decade to develop biofuels as an alternative to oil and gas,
and on other technologies to battle climate change. The sum alone was staggering
but the most elegant part was where the money would be coming from: Branson
would divert the funds from profits generated by Virgin's fossil fuel-burning
transportation lines. As Branson explained in an interview, "Any dividends or
share sales or any money that we make from our airlines or trains will be ploughed
back into tackling global warming, into investing in finding new, clean fuels and
investing in trying to find fuels for jet engines so that we can hopefully reverse the
inevitability of, you know, of destroying the world if we let it carry on the way it's

. „6

going.

In short, Branson was volunteering to do precisely what our governments have
been unwilling to legislate — require that the profits being earned from warming
the planet be channeled into the costly transition away from these dangerous
energy sources. The director of the Natural Resources Defense Council's Move
America Beyond Oil campaign said of Virgin's renewable energy initiatives, "This
is exactly what the whole industry should be looking at." Furthermore, Branson
pledged that if its transportation divisions weren't profitable enough to meet the
$3 billion target, "the money will come out of our existing businesses." He would
do "whatever it takes" to fulfill the commitment because "what is the point of

holding back when there will be no businesses" if we fail to act?

Bill Clinton was dazzled, calling the $3 billion pledge "groundbreaking, not only
because of the price tag — which is phenomenal — but also because of the statement
that he is making." The New Yorker described it as "by far the biggest such

commitment that has yet been made to fight global warming."

But Branson wasn't finished. A year later he was back in the news with the
"Virgin Earth Challenge" — a $25 million prize that would go to the first inventor

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to figure out how to sequester one billion tons of carbon a year from the air
"without countervailing harmful effects." He described it as "the largest ever
science and technology prize to be offered in history." This, Branson pronounced,
was "the best way to find a solution to the problem of climate change," elaborating
in an official statement that, "If the greatest minds in the world today compete, as
I'm sure they will, for The Virgin Earth Challenge, I believe that a solution to the

CO2 problem could hopefully be found — a solution that could save our planet —

not only for our children but for all the children yet to come."

And the best part, he said, is that if these competing geniuses crack the carbon
code, the " 'doom and gloom' scenario vanishes. We can carry on living our lives
in a pretty normal way — we can drive our cars, we can fly our planes, life can carry
on as normal." 12 Indeed the idea that we can solve the climate crisis without having
to change our lifestyles in any way — certainly not by taking fewer Virgin flights —
seemed to be the underlying assumption of all of Branson's various climate
initiatives. With the $3 billion pledge, he would try to invent a low carbon fuel that
could keep his airlines running at full capacity. If that failed, and carbon still
needed to be burned to keep the planes in the air, then the prize would surely help
invent a way to suck the heat-trapping gas out of the sky before it's too late. To
cover one more base, in 2009 Branson launched the Carbon War Room, an industry
group looking for ways that different sectors could lower their emissions
voluntarily, and save money in the process. "Carbon is the enemy," Branson
declared. "Let's attack it in any possible way we can, or many people will die just
like in any war." 11

Billionaires and Broken Dreams

For many mainstream greens, Branson seemed to be a dream come true: a flashy,
media-darling billionaire out to show the world that fossil-fuel-
intensive companies can lead the way to a green future using profit as the most
potent tool — and proving just how serious he was by putting striking amounts of
his own cash on the line. As Branson explained to Time, "If the government can't

deliver, it's up to industries to [do it] themselves. We have to make it a win-win

for all concerned." This is what groups like the Environmental Defense Fund had
been saying since the 1980s in explaining why they partnered with big polluters,
and what they had attempted to prove with the carbon market. But never before
had there been a single figure willing to use his own multibillion- dollar empire as

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a test case. Branson's personal account of the impact of Gore's PowerPoint also
seemed to confirm the notion, cherished in many green circles, that transforming
the economy away from fossil fuels is not about confronting the rich and powerful
but simply about reaching them with sufficiently persuasive facts and figures and
appealing to their sense of humanity.

There had been major green philanthropists before. Men like financier Jeremy
Grantham, who underwrites a large portion of the U.S. and British green
movement, as well as a lot of related academic research, with wealth from
Grantham, Mayo, Van Otterloo & Co., the investment management firm he
cofounded. But these funders tended to stay behind the scenes. And unlike
Branson, Grantham has not attempted to turn his own financial firm into proof that
the quest for short-term profits can be reconciled with his personal concerns about
ecological collapse. On the contrary, Grantham is known for his bleak quarterly
letters, in which he has mused on our economic model's collision course with the
planet. "Capitalism, by ignoring the finite nature of resources and by neglecting
the long-term well-being of the planet and its potentially crucial biodiversity,
threatens our existence," Grantham wrote in 2012 — but that doesn't mean savvy
investors can't get very rich on the way down, both from the final scramble for

fossil fuels, and by setting themselves up as disaster capitalists.

Take Warren Buffett, for instance. For a brief time, he too seemed to be
auditioning for the role of Great Green Hope, stating, in 2007, that, "the odds are
good that global warming is serious" and that even if there is a chance it won't be
"you have to build the ark before the rains come. If you have to make a mistake,
err on the side of the planet. Build a margin of safety to take care of the only planet

we have." But it soon became clear that Buffett was not interested in applying
this logic to his own corporate assets. On the contrary, Berkshire Hathaway has
done its best in subsequent years to make sure those rains come with ferocity.

Buffett owns several huge coal-burning utilities and holds large stakes in
ExxonMobil and the tar sands giant Suncor. Most significantly, in 2009 Buffett
announced that his company would spend $26 billion to buy what it didn't already
own of the Burlington Northern Santa Fe railroad. Buffett called the deal — the
largest in Berkshire Hathaway history — "a bet on the country." It was also a bet
on coal: BNSF is one of the biggest coal haulers in the United States and one of
the primary engines behind the drive to greatly expand coal exports to China.

Investments like these push us further down the road toward catastrophic
warming, of course — and Buffett is poised to be one of the biggest winners there
too. That' s because he is a major player in the reinsurance business, the part of the

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insurance sector that stands to profit most from climate disruption. As Eli Lehrer,
the insurance industry advocate who defected from the Heartland Institute after its
controversial billboard campaign, explains, "A large reinsurer like Warren
Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway might simultaneously underwrite the risk of an
industrial accident in Japan, a flood in the U.K., a hurricane in Florida, and a
cyclone in Australia. Since there's almost no chance that all of these events will
happen at the same time, the reinsurer can profit from the premiums it earns on
one type of coverage even when it pays out mammoth claims on another." Perhaps
it's worth remembering that Noah's Ark was not built to hold everyone, but just
the lucky few.~

The newest billionaire raising big hopes in the climate scene is Tom Steyer, a
major donor to various climate and anti-tar sands campaigns, as well as to the
Democratic Party. Steyer, who made his fortune with the fossil-fuel-heavy hedge
fund Farallon Capital Management, has made some serious attempts to bring his
business dealings in line with his climate concerns. But unlike Branson, Steyer has
done this by leaving the business that he founded, precisely because, as The Globe
and Mail reported, "it valued a company's bottom line, not its carbon footprint."
He further explained, "I have a passion to push for what I believe is the right thing.
And I couldn't do it in good conscience and hold down a job — and get paid very
well for doing a job — where I wasn't directly doing the right thing." This stance
is very different from Branson's, who is actively trying to prove that it is possible
for a fossil-fuel-based company not just to do the right thing but to lead the

transition to a clean economy. Nor is Branson in precisely the same category as
Michael Bloomberg and Bill Gates, who have both used their philanthropy to
aggressively shape the kinds of climate solutions on offer. Bloomberg, for
instance, has been held up as a hero for his large donations to green groups like the
Sierra Club and EDF, and for the supposedly enlightened climate policies he

1*18

introduced while mayor of New York City.

But while talking a good game about carbon bubbles and stranded assets (his
company is set to introduce the "Bloomberg Carbon Risk Valuation Tool" to
provide data and analysis to its clients about how fossil fuel stocks would be
impacted by a range of climate actions), Bloomberg has made no discernible
attempt to manage his own vast wealth in a manner that reflects these concerns.
On the contrary, as previously mentioned, he helped set up Willett Advisors, a firm
specializing in oil and gas assets, for both his personal and philanthropic holdings.
Brad Briner, director of real assets for Willett, stated plainly in May 2013 that,

THIS CHANGES EVERYTHING | 203

"We are natural gas bulls. We think oil is well priced," citing new drilling
investments on the horizon.^

It's not simply that Bloomberg is actively snapping up fossil fuel assets even as
he funds reports warning that climate change makes for "risky business." It's that
those gas assets may well have increased in value as a result of Bloomberg's
environmental giving, what with EDF championing natural gas as a replacement
for coal and the Sierra Club spending tens of millions of Bloomberg's dollars
shutting down coal plants. Was funding the war on coal at least partially about
boosting the share price of gas? Or was that just a bonus? Perhaps there is no
connection between his philanthropic priorities and his decision to entrust so much
of his fortune to the oil and gas sector. But these investment choices do raise
uncomfortable questions about Bloomberg's status as a climate hero, as well as his
2014 appointment as a United Nations special envoy for cities and climate change
(questions Bloomberg has not answered despite repeated requests). At the very
least, they demonstrate that seeing the risks climate change poses to financial
markets in the long term may not be enough to curtail the temptation to profit from

planet destabilization in the short-term.

Bill Gates has a similar firewall between mouth and money. Though he professes
great concern about climate change, the Gates Foundation had at least $1.2 billion
invested in just two oil giants, BP and ExxonMobil, as of December 2013, and

those are only the beginning of his fossil fuel holdings.

Gates's approach to the climate crisis, meanwhile, shares a fair amount with
Branson's. When Gates had his climate change epiphany, he too immediately
raced to the prospect of a silver-bullet techno-fix in the future, without pausing to
consider viable — if economically challenging — responses in the here and now. In
TED Talks, op-eds, interviews, and in his much-discussed annual letters, Gates
repeats his call for governments to massively increase spending on research and
development with the goal of uncovering "energy miracles." By miracles, Gates
means nuclear reactors that have yet to be invented (he is a major investor and
chairman of nuclear start-up TerraPower); he means machines to suck carbon out
of the atmosphere (he is also a primary investor in at least one such prototype); and
he means direct climate manipulation (Gates has spent millions of his own money
funding research into various schemes to block the sun, and his name is listed on
several hurricane-suppression patents). At the same time, he has been dismissive
of the potential of existing renewable technologies. "We focus too much on
deployment of stuff that we have today," Gates claims, writing off energy solutions

THIS CHANGES EVERYTHING | 204

like rooftop solar as "cute" and "noneconomic" (despite the fact that these cute

technologies are already providing 25 percent of Germany's electricity).

The real difference between Gates and Branson is that Branson still has a hands-
on leadership role at Virgin and Gates left the top job at Microsoft years ago.
Which is why when Branson entered the climate fray, he was really in a category
of his own — promising to turn a major multinational, one with fossil fuels at its
center, into an engine for building the next economy. The only other figure who
had raised similar hopes was the brash Texas oilman T. Boone Pickens. In 2008,
he launched "The Pickens Plan," which, backed by a huge advertising budget in
print and television, promised to end U.S. dependence on foreign oil by massively
boosting wind and solar, and converting vehicles to natural gas. "I've been an oil
man my whole life," Pickens said in his commercials, with his heavy Texas twang.

"But this is one emergency we can't drill our way out of.""

The kind of policies and subsidies Pickens was advocating were ones from
which the billionaire's energy hedge fund, BP Capital, was poised to profit — but
for the greens cheering him on, that wasn't the point. Carl Pope, then heading the
Sierra Club, joined the billionaire on his private Gulfstream jet to help him sell the
plan to reporters. "To put it plainly, T. Boone Pickens is out to save America," he
pronounced.^

Or not. Shortly after Pickens's announcement, the fracking frenzy took off, and
suddenly powering the grid with unconventional natural gas looked a lot more
appealing to BP Capital than relying on wind. Within a couple of years the Pickens
Plan had radically changed. It now had almost nothing to do with renewable energy
and everything to do with pushing for more gas extraction no matter the cost.
"You're stuck with hydrocarbons — come on, get real," Pickens told a group of
reporters in April 201 1, while questioning the seriousness of human-caused global
warming to boot. By 2012, he was extolling the virtues of the tar sands and the
Keystone XL pipeline. As David Friedman, then research director for the Clean
Vehicles Program at the Union of Concerned Scientists, put it: Pickens "kept
saying that this wasn't about private interests, it was about the nation and the
world. But to dump the part that actually had the greatest potential to cut global
warming and pollution and help create new jobs in the U.S., in favor of the piece

that really does most benefit his bottom line, was a disappointment."

Which leaves us with Branson — his pledge, his prize, and his broader vision of
voluntarily changing capitalism so that it is in keeping with the laws of "Gaia."

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Almost a decade after Branson's PowerPoint epiphany, it seems like a good time
to check in on the "win-win" crusade. It's too much to expect Branson to have
changed the way business is done in less than a decade, of course. But given the
hype, it does seem fair to examine how his attempts to prove that industry can lead
us away from climate catastrophe without heavy government intervention have
progressed. Because given the dismal track record of his fellow green billionaires
on that front, it may be fair to conclude that if Branson can't do it, no one can.

The Pledge That Turned into a "Gesture"

Let's start with Branson's "firm commitment" to spend $3 billion over a decade
developing a miracle fuel. Despite press reports portraying the pledge as a gift, the
original concept was more like straight-up vertical integration. And integration is
Branson's hallmark: the first Virgin business was record sales, but Branson built
his global brand by making sure that he not only owned the music stores, but the
studio where the bands recorded, and the record label that represented them. Now
he was applying the same logic to his airlines. Why pay Shell and Exxon to power
Virgin planes and trains when Virgin could invent its own transport fuel? If it
worked, the gambit would not only turn Branson into an environmental hero but
also make him a whole lot richer.

So the first tranche of money Branson diverted from his transportation divisions
went to launch a new Virgin business, originally called Virgin Fuels and since
replaced by a private equity firm called the Virgin Green Fund. In keeping with
his pledge, Branson started off by investing in various agrofuel businesses,
including making a very large bet of roughly $130 million on corn ethanol. And
Virgin has attached its name to several biofuel pilot projects — one to derive jet
fuel from eucalyptus trees, another from fermented gas waste — though it has not
gone in as an investor. (Instead it mainly offers PR support, and a pledge to
purchase the fuel if it becomes viable.) But by Branson's own admission, the
miracle fuel he was looking for "hasn't been invented yet" and the biofuels sector
has stalled, thanks in part to the influx of fracked oil and gas. In response to written
interview questions, Branson conceded, "It's increasingly clear that this is a
question of creating the market conditions that would allow a diverse portfolio of
different renewable fuel producers, suppliers and customers to all work in the same
way that conventional fuel supply chains work today. It's one of the issues that the
Carbon War Room's renewable jet fuels operation is looking to solve."^

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Perhaps this is why Branson's green investment initiative appears to have lost
much of its early interest in alternative fuels. Today, the Virgin Green Fund
continues to invest in one biofuel company, but the rest of its investments are a
grab bag of vaguely green-hued projects, from water desalination to energy-
efficient lighting, to an in-car monitoring system to help drivers conserve gas. Evan
Lovell, a partner in the Virgin Green Fund, acknowledged in an interview that the
search for a breakthrough fuel has given way to a "much more incremental"

approach, one with fewer risks and more short-term return.

Diversifying his holdings to get a piece of the green market is Branson's
prerogative, of course. But hundreds of venture capitalists have made the same
hedge, as have all the major investment banks. It hardly would seem to merit the
fanfare inspired by Branson's original announcement. Especially because the
investments themselves have been so unremarkable. Jigar Shah, a Branson
supporter who ran the Carbon War Room, is frank about this: "I don't think that
he's made a lot of great investments in the climate change space. But the fact that

he's passionate about it is a good thing."

Then there is the small matter of dollar amounts. When Branson made his
pledge, he said that he would "invest 100 percent of all future proceeds of the
Virgin Group from our transportation businesses into tackling global warming for

an estimated value of $3 billion over the next 10 years." That was 2006. If
Branson is to make it to $3 billion by 2016, by this point, at least $2 billion should
have been spent. He' s not even close.

In 2010 — four years into the pledge — Branson told The Economist that he had
so far only invested "two or three hundred million dollars in clean energy,"
blaming poor profits in the airline sector. In February 2014, he told The
Observer that "we have invested hundreds of millions in clean technology
projects." Not much progress, in other words. And it may be even less: according
to Virgin Green Fund partner Lovell, Virgin has still only contributed around $100
million (outsider investors had matched that), on top of the original ethanol
investment, which as of 2013, brings the total Branson investment to something
around $230 million. (Lovell confirmed that "we are the primary vehicle" for
Branson's promise.) Add to that an undisclosed, but likely modest personal
investment in an algae company called Solazyme, and we are still looking at well
under $300 million dollars, seven years into the ten-year pledge that is supposed
to reach $3 billion. As of this writing, no major new investments had been

, 30

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Branson refused to answer direct questions about how much he had spent,
writing that "it's very hard to quantify the total amount we've invested in relation
to climate change across the Group," and his labyrinthine holdings make it hard to
come up with independent estimates. "I'm not very good with figures," the
billionaire has said about another murky corner of Virgin's empire, adding "I failed
my elementary maths." Part of the confusion stems from the fact that it's unclear
what should be counted toward the original $3 billion pledge. It began as a targeted
quest for a miracle green fuel, then expanded to become a search for clean
technologies generally, then, apparently, eco- anything. Branson now says that he
is counting "investments made by individual Virgin companies in sustainability
measures, such as more efficient fleets" of planes. More recently, Branson's fight
against global warming has centered around various attempts to "green" his two
private islands in the Caribbean, one of which serves as his deluxe family
compound and the other a $60,000 a night hotel. Branson claims the model he is
setting will help nearby Caribbean nations to switch to renewable power
themselves. Perhaps it will, but it's all a long way from the pledge to transform

capitalism back in 2006.^

The Virgin boss now plays down his original commitment, no longer referring
to it as a "pledge" but rather a "gesture." In 2009, he told Wired magazine, "In a
sense, whether it's $2 billion, $3 billion or $4 billion is not particularly relevant."
Branson told me that when the deadline rolls around, "I suspect it will be less than
$1 billion right now." That too may prove an exaggeration: if the publicly available
information is correct, he would have to more than triple the green energy
investments he has made so far. When asked, Branson blamed the shortfall on
everything from high oil prices to the global financial crisis: "The world was quite
different back in 2006.. . . In the last eight years our airlines have lost hundreds of

millions of dollars."

Given these various explanations for falling short, it is worth taking a look at
some of the things for which Richard Branson and Virgin did manage to find
money in this key period. Like, for instance, a massive global push to put more
carbon-spewing planes in the skies adorned with stylized "V"s on their tails.

When Branson met with Al Gore he warned the former vice president that however
alarmed he became about what he learned about climate change, he was about to
launch a new air route to Dubai and wasn't about to change that. That wasn't the
half of it. In 2007, just one year after seeing the climate light with Gore and

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deciding, as he put it, that "my new goal in life is to work at reducing carbon
emissions," Branson launched his most ambitious venture in years: Virgin
America, a brand-new airline competing in the U.S. domestic market. Even by the
standards of a new venture, Virgin America's growth rates in its first five years
have been startling: from forty flights a day to five destinations in its first year, it
reached 177 flights a day to twenty-three destinations in 2013. And the airline has
plans to add forty more planes to its fleet by the middle of the next decade. In
2010, The Globe and Mail reported that Virgin America was heading for "the most
aggressive expansion of any North American airline in an era when most domestic

carriers have been retrenching."^
Branson's capacity to expand so quickly has been boosted by rock-bottom seat

sales, including offering tickets for just $60. With prices like that, Branson was
not just poaching passengers from United and American, he was getting more
people up in the air. The new airline, however, has been a hugely costly endeavor,
generating hundreds of millions in losses. Bad news for the Green Fund, which
needed Virgin's transportation businesses to do well in order to get topped up.

Branson hasn't only been expanding his transportation businesses in the
Americas. The number of people flying on various Virgin-branded Australian
airlines increased by 27 percent in the five years following his climate pledge, from
fifteen million passengers in 2007 to nineteen million in 2012. And in 2009, he
launched a whole new long-haul airline, V Australia. Then, in April 2013, Branson
unveiled yet another ambitious new venture: Little Red, a domestic airline for the
U.K., starting with twenty-six flights a day. In true Branson style, when he
launched the new airline in Edinburgh, he dressed in a kilt and flashed his
underwear to reporters, which he had emblazoned with the words "stiff
competition." But as with Virgin America, this was not just about competing with
rivals for existing fliers: Virgin was so keen on expanding the number of people
who could use the most carbon-intensive form of transportation that it offered a
celebratory seat sale for some flights that charged customers no fares at all, only
taxes — which came to about half the price of a cab from central London to

Heathrow during rush hour.^

So this is what Branson has done on his climate change Road to Damascus: he
went on an airplane-procurement spree. When Virgin's various expansions are
tallied up, around 160 hardworking planes have been added to its global fleet since
Branson's epiphany with Al Gore — quite possibly more than that. And the
atmospheric consequences are entirely predictable. In the years after his climate
pledge, Virgin airlines' greenhouse gas emissions soared by approximately 40

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percent. Virgin Australia's emissions jumped by 81 percent between 2006-2007
and 2012-2013, while Virgin America's emissions shot up by 177 percent between
2008 and 2012. (The only bright spot in Branson's emissions record was a dip at
Virgin Atlantic between 2007 and 2010 — but that likely was less the result of
visionary climate policy than the global economic downturn and the massive
volcanic eruption in Iceland, which hit airlines indiscriminately.)

Much of the sharp overall rise in Virgin's emissions was due to the airlines'
rapid growth rate — but that wasn't the only factor. A study by the International
Council on Clean Transportation on the relative fuel efficiency of fifteen U.S.
domestic airlines in 2010 found that Virgin America clocked in at ninth

placed This is quite a feat considering that, unlike its much older competitors, the
brand-new airline could have built the best fuel efficiency practices into its
operations from day one. Clearly Virgin chose not to.

And it's not just airplanes. While he has been publicly waging his carbon war,
Branson unveiled Virgin Racing to compete in Formula One (he claimed he had
entered the sport only because he saw opportunities to make it greener but quickly
lost interest). He also invested heavily in Virgin Galactic, his own personal dream
of launching the first commercial flights into space, for a mere $250,000 per
passenger. Not only is leisure space travel a pointless waste of (planet-warming)
energy, it is also yet another money pit: according to Fortune, by early 2013
Branson had spent "more than $200 million" on the vanity project, with much more
in the works. That would be more than he appears to have spent on the search for
a green fuel to power his planes.^

When asked about the status of his $3 billion climate pledge, Branson tends to

plead poor, pointing to the losses posted by his transportation businesses. But
given the manic level of growth in these sectors, it's an excuse that rings hollow.
Not only have his trains been doing quite well, but given the flurry of new routes
and new airlines, there was clearly no shortage of surplus money to spend. It's just
that the Virgin Group decided to follow the basic imperative of capital: grow or
die.

It's also worth remembering that Branson was very clear when he announced
the pledge that if his transportation divisions were not profitable enough to meet
the target, he would divert funds from other parts of the Virgin empire. And here
we run into another kind of problem: Branson's corporate modus operandi is
somewhat nontraditional. He tends to pull in relatively modest profits (or even
losses) while spending a great deal of money (his own, his partners', and
taxpayers') building up flashy extensions of the Virgin brand. Then, when a new

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company is established, he sells all or part of his stake for a hefty sum, and a
lucrative brand licensing deal. This money isn't posted as profits from those
businesses, but it helps explain how Branson's net worth rose from an estimated
$2.8 billion in 2006, the year he met with Gore, to an estimated $5.1 billion in
2014. Musing on his passion for environmentalism to John Vidal mThe Observer,
Branson said, "I find it interests me a lot more than making a few more bucks; it's

much more satisfactory." And yet a few more bucks he has certainly made.

Meanwhile, with the ten-year deadline fast approaching, it seems we are no
closer to a miracle fuel to power Branson's planes, which are burning significantly
more carbon than when the pledge period began. But fear not, because Branson

has what he describes as his "fallback insurance policy." So how is that going?

The Incredible Disappearing Earth Challenge

After the original hoopla over Branson's $25 million Virgin Earth Challenge (or
Earth Prize, as it is more frequently called), the initiative seemed to go dormant
for a while. When journalists remembered to ask the Virgin chief about the search
for a miracle technology to suck large amounts of carbon from the air, he seemed
to subtly lower expectations, much as he has done with green fuels. And he had
always cautioned that there was a chance that no one would win the prize. In
November 2010, Branson revealed that Virgin had received something on the order
of 2,500 entries. Nick Fox, Branson's spokesperson, explained that many ideas had
to be ruled out because they were too risky and seemingly safer ones were not
"developed enough to be commercialized right now." In Branson's words, there

was no "slam dunk winner yet."

Fox also mentioned that far more than $25 million was needed to determine
some ideas' large-scale viability, something more on the order of $2.5 billion.^

Branson claims he hasn't completely given up on awarding the prize at some
future point, saying, "We hope it's only a matter of time before there's a winner."
He has, however, changed his role from straight-up patron to something more akin
to a celebrity judge on a reality TV show, giving his blessing to the most promising
ideas and helping them land high-level advice, investment, and other opportunities

flowing from their association with the Virgin brand.

This new incarnation of the Earth Challenge was unveiled (to significantly less
fanfare than the first time around) in November 2011, at an energy conference in
Calgary, Alberta. Appearing by video link, Branson announced the eleven most

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promising entries. Four were machines that directly sucked carbon out of the air
(though none at anywhere near the scale needed); three were companies using the
biochar process, which turns carbon-sequestering plant matter or manure into
charcoal and then buries it in the soil and is controversial on a mass scale; and
among the miscellaneous ideas was a surprisingly low-tech one involving

revamping livestock grazing to boost the carbon-sequestering potential of soil.

According to Branson, none of these finalists was ready yet to win the $25
million prize but they were being showcased like beauty queens at the energy
conference so that "the best engineers, investors, opinion formers and policy
makers [would] work together on this challenge. Only then will the potential be

realised. I see Calgary as a great city to start in."

It was certainly a revealing choice. Calgary is the economic heart of Canada's
tar sands boom. Oil from those dirty deposits has made the city one of the richest
metropolises in the world, but its ongoing prosperity is entirely contingent on
continuing to find customers for its product. And that depends very much on
getting controversial pipelines like Keystone XL constructed through increasingly
hostile territory, as well as on dissuading foreign governments from passing laws
that would penalize Alberta's particularly high-carbon fuel.

Enter Alan Knight, Richard Branson's sustainability advisor and the man he put
in charge of the Earth Challenge. Knight took great pride in being Branson's go-
to green guy, but their relationship was far from exclusive. Shell and Statoil (two
of the biggest players in the tar sands) were among the other clients in Knight's
consultancy. So too was, in his words, "Calgary City and the Alberta oil sands
industry," specifically the Oil Sands Leadership Initiative (OSLI), an industry
trade group comprised of ConocoPhillips, Nexen, Shell, Statoil, Suncor Energy,
and Total. Knight boasted of being given "private access to their meetings," and
explained that he advised his clients in the Alberta oil patch on how to allay
mounting concerns about the enormous ecological costs of an extraction process

that is three to four times more greenhouse gas intensive than conventional crude.

His suggestion? Adopt a "narrative" about how their "awesome" technology can
be used not just to extract dirty oil but to solve the environmental problems of
tomorrow. And, he says, the choice of Calgary to host the next phase of Branson's
Earth Challenge was "no coincidence"; indeed it appeared to be a way for him to
serve the interests of some of his biggest clients all at once — the tar sands giants
as well as Richard Branson. In an interview, Knight explained that "you've got a
lot of very good engineers and you've got a lot of very highly financed companies

who should be looking at this technology."

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But what exactly would they be looking at this technology to do? Not simply to
suck out the carbon that they are putting into the air, but also, it turns out, to add
even more carbon. Because in Calgary, the Virgin Earth Challenge was
"reeingineered," to use Knight's word. While previously the goal had been to find
technology capable of removing large amounts of carbon and safely storing it,
Knight started referring to the prize as "an initiative to develop technology to

recycle CO2 direct from the air into commercially viable products."

It made a certain amount of sense: removing carbon out of the air has long been
technically possible. The problems have always been finding a means of removal
that was not prohibitively costly, as well as storage and scale. In a market economy
that means finding customers interested in buying a whole lot of captured carbon.
Which is where the decision to pitch the eleven most promising entries in Calgary
started to gel. Since the mid-2000s, the oil industry has been increasing its use of
a method known as Enhanced Oil Recovery (EOR) — a set of techniques that
mostly use high-pressure gas or steam injections to squeeze more oil out of existing
fields. Most commonly, wells are injected with CO2 and research shows that this
use of CO2COUW cause the U.S. proven oil reserves to double or even, with "next-
generation" technologies, quadruple. But there is a problem (other than the obvious
planet-cooking one): according to Tracy Evans, former president of the Texas oil
and gas company Denbury Resources, "The single largest deterrent to expanding
production from EOR today is the lack of large volumes of reliable and affordable
CO2." With this in mind, several of Branson's group of eleven finalists have
pitched themselves as the start-ups best positioned to supply the oil industry with
the steady stream of carbon dioxide it needs to keep the oil flowing. Ned David,
president of Kilimanjaro Energy, one of Branson's finalists, claimed that machines
like his have the potential to release huge volumes of oil once assumed untappable,
similar to what fracking did for natural gas. It could be, he said, "a money gusher."
He toldFortune, "The prize is nearly 100 billion barrels of U.S. oil if you can
economically capture CO2 from air. That's $10 trillion of oil."

David Keith, who has been studying geoengineering for twenty-five years, and
who is the inventor of another one of the carbon-capture machines to make
Branson's list, was slightly more circumspect. He explained that if carbon that was
removed from the air were used to extract oil, "you're making hydrocarbon fuel
with a very low life-cycle [of] carbon emissions." Maybe not so low, because
according to a study from the U.S. Department of Energy's National Energy
Technology Laboratory, EOR techniques are estimated to be almost three times as
greenhouse- gas intensive as conventional extraction. And the oil is still going to

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be burned, thereby contributing to climate change. While more research is needed
on the overallcarbon footprint of EOR, one striking modeling study examined a
similar proposal that would use CO2 captured not from the air but directly from
coal plants. It found that the emissions benefit of sequestering CO2 would be more
than canceled out by all that extra oil: on a system-wide basis, the process could

still end up releasing about four times as much CO2 as it would save.

Moreover, much of this is oil that is currently considered unrecoverable — i.e.,
not even counted in current proven reserves, which as we know already represents
five times more than we can safely burn. Any technology that can quadruple
proven reserves in the U.S. alone is a climate menace, not a climate solution. As
David Hawkins of the Natural Resources Defense Council puts it, air capture has

"morphed very rapidly from a technology whose purpose is to remove CO2 to a

technology whose purpose is to produce CO2." And Richard Branson has gone
from promising to help get us off oil to championing technologies aimed at
extracting and burning much more of it. Some prize.

A Regulatory Avoidance Strategy?

There was something else worth noting about Branson's decision to allow his Earth
Challenge to cobrand with the Alberta oil sector. The Calgary event took place at
a moment when the San Francisco-based ForestEthics had been upping the
pressure on large corporations to boycott oil derived from the Alberta tar sands
because of its high-carbon footprint. A fierce debate was also unfolding over
whether new European fuel standards would effectively ban the sale of tar sands
oil in Europe. And as early as 2008, the NRDC had sent open letters to fifteen U.S.
and Canadian airlines asking them "to adopt their own corporate 'Low Carbon
Fuel Standard' and to publicly oppose the expansion" of fuel from the tar sands
and other unconventional sources, and to avoid these fuels in their own fleets. The

group made a special appeal to Branson, citing his leadership in "combating global

warming and developing alternative fuels."

It seemed like a fair enough demand: the Virgin chief had enjoyed enormous
publicity for his very public climate- change promises. None of them had yielded
much, but surely, while he was waiting for an algae-based jet fuel to materialize
or for someone to win the Earth Prize, Branson could make the relatively minor
concession of refusing to power his rapidly expanding fleet of airplanes with one
of the most carbon-intensive fuels on the market.

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Branson did not make that commitment. Alan Knight publicly stated, "I do not
believe supporting a boycott is fair" and claimed that it was "impossible for an
airline to boycott fuel made from oil sands" — a position contradicted by many
experts. But Branson went further than refusing to participate in the boycott. By
bringing the Earth Challenge to Calgary, Branson in effect did for the tar sands
what his grand (but largely ephemeral) climate gestures have been doing for Virgin
all these years: dangled the prospect of a miracle technological fix for carbon
pollution just over the horizon in order to buy time to continue escalating
emissions, free of meddlesome regulation. Indeed it can be argued — and some
do — that Branson's planet-savior persona is an elaborate attempt to avoid the kind
of tough regulatory action that was on the horizon in the U.K. and Europe precisely
when he had his high-profile green conversion.

After all, 2006 was a pivotal year for the climate change debate. Public concern
was rising dramatically, particularly in the U.K. where the movement's radical,
grassroots flank was dominated by young activists who were determined to stop
the expansion of the fossil fuel economy in its tracks. Much as they oppose
fracking today, these activists used daring direct action to oppose new airports, as
well as the highly controversial proposed new runway at Heathrow, which the
airport claims would increase its number of flights by more than 50 percent.

At the same time, the U.K. government was considering a broad climate change
bill that would have impacted the airline sector, and Gordon Brown, Britain's
chancellor at the time, had attempted to discourage flying with a marginal increase
of the air passenger duty. In addition, the EU was entertaining a proposal to lift the
airline industry's exemption from paying a Value Added Tax and introduce an
additional tax on aviation fuel. All these measures taken together posed a

significant threat to the profit margins of Branson's chosen industry.

Branson often talks a good game about supporting government regulation
(saying he favors a global carbon tax, for instance), but he consistently opposes
serious climate regulations when they are actually on the table. He has, for
instance, been a hyperbolic, even bullying advocate of British airport expansion,
including that new runway at Heathrow. He is so hungry for the expansion, in fact,
that he has claimed, at various points, that its absence "will turn us into a third
world country," that "global corporations will turn their back on London in favour
of better connected cities," and that "Heathrow will become a symbol of British

*58

decline.") This wasn't the only time Branson's claims to be committed to
waging war on carbon came into conflict with his hard-nosed business instincts.

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He came out against the proposed climate tax in Australia and blasted a plan for a

-j-59

global tax on airlines, claiming it "would tax the industry out of existence."

It's this pattern that convinced Mike Childs of Friends of the Earth U.K. that
Branson's reinvention as a guilt-ridden planet wrecker volunteering to use his
carbon profits to solve the climate crisis was little more than a cynical ploy. "It
comes across as a charitable act," Childs warned of the $3 billion pledge, "but I
think he is also trying to take some of the heat out of aviation as a political issue.
If you are running a transport company, you must have realized by now that climate
change is going to be a massive issue for you."

Was he right? Well, one immediate impact of Branson's pledge was that, all of
a sudden, you could feel good about flying again — after all, the profits from that
ticket to Barbados were going into Branson's grand plan to discover a miracle
green fuel. It was an even more effective conscience cleaner than carbon offsets
(though Virgin sold those, too). As for punitive regulations and taxes, who would
want to get in the way of an airline whose proceeds were going to such a good
cause? And this was always Branson's argument: let him grow, unencumbered by
regulation, and he will use that growth to finance our collective green transition.
"If you hold industry back, we will not, as a nation, have the resources to come up
with the new clean-energy solutions we need," Branson argued. "Business is the
key to solving the financial and environmental crisis."

So the skeptics might be right: Branson's various climate adventures may indeed
prove to have all been a spectacle, a Virgin production, with everyone's favorite
bearded billionaire playing the part of planetary savior to build his brand, land on
late night TV, fend off regulators, and feel good about doing bad. It is certainly
noteworthy that the show has been significantly less voluble ever since the
Conservative-led government of David Cameron came to power in the U.K. and
made it clear that Branson and his ilk faced no serious threat of top-down climate
regulations. But even if the constantly moving goalposts in Branson's climate
initiatives merit that kind of cynicism, there is also a more charitable interpretation
of what has gone wrong. This interpretation would grant Branson his obvious love
of nature (whether it's watching the tropical birds on his private island or
ballooning over the Himalayas). And it would credit him with genuinely trying to
figure out ways to reconcile running carbon-intensive businesses with a profound
personal desire to help slow species extinction and avert climate chaos. It would
acknowledge, too, that between the pledge, the prize, and the Carbon War Room,
Branson has thought up some rather creative mechanisms to try to channel profits
generated from warming the planet into projects that could help keep it cool.

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But if we do grant Branson these good intentions, then the fact that all of these
projects have failed to yield results is all the more relevant. Branson set out to
harness the profit motive to solve the climate crisis — but the temptation to profit
from practices worsening the crisis proved too great to resist. Again and again, the
demands of building a successful empire trumped the climate imperative —
whether that meant lobbying against needed regulation, or putting more planes in
the air, or pitching oil companies on using his pet miracle technologies to extract
more oil. The idea that capitalism and only capitalism can save the world from a
crisis created by capitalism is no longer an abstract theory; it's a hypothesis that
has been tested and retested in the real world. We are now able to set theory aside
and take a hard look at the results: at the celebrities and media conglomerates that
were supposed to model chic green lifestyles who have long since moved on to the
next fad; at the green products that were shunted to the back of the supermarket
shelves at the first signs of recession; at the venture capitalists who were supposed
to bankroll a parade of innovation but have come up far short; at the fraud-infested,
boom-and-bust carbon market that has failed miserably to lower emissions; at the
natural gas sector that was supposed to be our bridge to renewables but ended up
devouring much of their market instead. And most of all, at the parade of
billionaires who were going to invent a new form of enlightened capitalism but
decided that, on second thought, the old one was just too profitable to surrender.

We've tried it Branson's way. (And Buffett's, Bloomberg's, Gates's, and
Pickens's way.) The soaring emissions speak for themselves. There will, no doubt,
be more billionaire saviors who make splashy entrances, with more schemes to
rebrand capitalism. The trouble is, we simply don't have another decade to lose
pinning our hopes on these sideshows. There is plenty of room to make a profit in
a zero-carbon economy; but the profit motive is not going to be the midwife for
that great transformation.

This is important because Branson was onto something with his pledge. It makes
perfect sense to make the profits and proceeds from the businesses that are most
responsible for exacerbating the climate crisis help pay for the transition to a safer,
greener future. Branson's original idea — to spend 100 percent of the proceeds from
his trains and airlines on figuring out a way to get off fossil fuels — was, at least in
theory, exactly the kind of thing that needs to take place on a grand scale. The
problem is that under current business models, once the shareholders have taken a
slice, once the executives have given themselves yet another raise, once Richard
Branson has launched yet another world- domination project and purchased
anotherprivate island, there doesn't seem to be much left over to fulfill the promise.

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Similarly, Alan Knight was onto something when he told his tar sands clients
that they should use their technological prowess to invent the low-carbon and
renewable energy sources of the future. As he said, "The potential narrative is
perfect." The hitch, of course, is that, so long as this vision is left to the
enlightened self-interest of oil and airline executives, it will remain just that: a
narrative — or rather, a fairy tale. Meanwhile, the industry will use its technology
and resources to develop ever more ingenious and profitable new ways to extract
fossil fuels from the deepest recesses of the earth, even as it fiercely defends its
public subsidies and resists the kind of minor increases to its tax and royalty rates
that would allow governments to fund green transitions without its help.

In this regard, Virgin is particularly brazen. The National Union of Rail,
Maritime and Transport Workers estimates that Virgin Trains has received more
than £3 billion (the equivalent of $5 billion) in subsidies since British railways
were privatized in the late 1990s — significantly more than Branson pledged to the
green fund. As recently as 2010, Branson and the Virgin Group received £18
million in dividends from Virgin Trains. Branson insists that the characterization
of him as a freeloader is "garbage," pointing to sharp increases in the number of
passengers on Virgin trains and writing, "far from receiving subsidies, we now pay
more than £100m a year to the taxpayer." But paying taxes is part of doing
business. So when Branson pays into the Green Fund, whose money is it really —
his own or the taxpayers'? And if a substantial portion of it originally belonged to
taxpayers, wouldn't it have been a better arrangement never to have sold off the
rails in the first place?~

If that were the case, the British people — with the climate crisis in mind — might
have long ago decided to reinvest rail profits back into improving their public
transit system, rather than allowing trains to become outdated and fares to
skyrocket while shareholders of private rail companies like Branson's pocketed
hundreds of millions in returns from their taxpayer-subsidized operations. And
rather than gambling on the invention of a miracle fuel, they might have decided
to make it a top political priority to shift the entire system over to electric trains,
with that power coming from renewable energy, rather than have the system
partially powered by diesel, as it is now. No wonder 66 percent of British residents

tell pollsters they support renationalizing the railway companies.

Richard Branson got at least one thing right. He showed us the kind of bold
model that has a chance of working in the tight time frame left: the profits from
our dirtiest industries must be diverted into the grand and hopeful project of
cleaning up their mess. But if there is one thing Branson has demonstrated, it is

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that it won't happen on a voluntary basis or on the honor system. It will have to be
legislated — using the kinds of tough regulations, higher taxes, and steeper royalty
rates these sectors have resisted all along.

Of course there is still a chance that one of Branson's techno- schemes could pan
out. He might yet stumble across a zero-carbon jet fuel, or a magic machine for
safely and cheaply removing carbon from the skies. Time, however, is not on our
side. David Keith, inventor of one of those carbon- sucking machines, in which Bill
Gates is a key investor, estimates that the technology is still decades away from
being taken to scale. "There's no way you can do a useful amount of carbon
dioxide removal in less than a third of a century or maybe half a century," he
says. As always with matters related to climate change, we have to keep one eye
on the ticking clock — and what that clock tells us is that if we are to have a solid
chance of avoiding catastrophic warming, we will need to be burning strictly
minimal amounts of fossil fuels a half century from now. If we spend the precious
years between now and then dramatically expanding our emissions (as Branson is
doing with his airlines, and as Knight's clients are doing in the tar sands), then we
are literally betting the habitability of the planet on the faint hope of a miracle cure.

And yet Branson (a notorious risk addict with a penchant for crashlanding hot
air balloons) is far from the only one willing to stake our collective future on this
kind of high-stakes gamble. Indeed the reason his various far-fetched schemes
have been taken as seriously as they have over the years is that he, alongside Bill
Gates with his near mystical quest for energy"miracles," taps into what may be our
culture's most intoxicating narrative: the belief that technology is going to save us
from the effects of our actions. Post-market crash and amidst ever more sinister
levels of inequality, most of us have come to realize that the oligarchs who were
minted by the era of deregulation and mass privatization are not, in fact, going to
use their vast wealth to save the world on our behalf. Yet our faith in techno
wizardry persists, embedded inside the superhero narrative that at the very last
minute our best and brightest are going to save us from disaster.

This is the great promise of geoengineering and it remains our culture's most
powerful form of magical thinking.

~ The Grantham Foundation for the Protection of the Environment has funded a broad range of large
environmental groups, ranging from The Nature Conservancy to Greenpeace, the Environmental Defense
Fund to 350.org .

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~ It should be noted that though Steyer has separated out his personal funds from Farallon, he remains a
limited partner and has also promoted the use of natural gas, helping to fund the EDF research that went
into its pro-fracking study and enthusiastically endorsing natural gas in The Wall Street Journal.

1 Those policies have been criticized for favoring big developers over vulnerable communities and for using
a green veneer to push through mega real estate development projects with dubious environmental benefits,
as Hunter College urban affairs professor Tom Angotti and others have written. Communities heavily
impacted by Hurricane Sandy, meanwhile, have claimed that Bloomberg's postdisaster rebuilding plans
were made with only token input from them.

~ Aided by investments like these, the ethanol boom was responsible for 20-40 percent of the spike in
agricultural commodity prices in 2007-2009, according to a survey by the National Academy of Sciences.

" Puerile humor of this sort is a recurring theme in Branson's PR machine (the company once painted
"Mine's Bigger than Yours" on the side of a new Airbus A340-600; boasted of its business-class seats that
"size does matter"; and even flew a blimp over London emblazoned with the slogan "BA [British Airways]
Can't Get It Up!!").

~ To quote one scathing assessment of the project by sociologist Salvatore Babones, "If two words can
capture the extraordinary redistribution of wealth from workers to the wealthy over the past forty years, the
flagrant shamelessness of contemporary conspicuous consumption, the privatization of what used to be
public privileges and the wanton destruction of our atmosphere that is rapidly leading toward the extinction
of nearly all non-human life on earth, all covered in a hypocritical pretense of pious environmental
virtue ... those two words are Virgin Galactic."

~ Including sustainability consultant Brendan May, founder of the Robertsbridge Group. "Of course you
can segregate fuel according to its source," May writes. "If there's a will, there's a way.... At present,
there's just no will."

~ In 2012, he went so far as to offer to invest roughly $8 billion in an expansion of Virgin Atlantic's
operations at Heathrow if the government would approve the new runway — a prospect that once again
raises questions about Branson's claims to be too broke to keep up with his $3 billion climate pledge.

1 Branson is apparently no great fan of paying taxes generally, as his byzantine network of offshore holding
companies in the Channel Islands and British Virgin Islands attests. Indeed he spent a night in jail and
received a hefty fine after getting caught in an illegal cross-border tax avoidance scam when running his
first company in 1971. "I was a criminal," Branson writes of his jailhouse revelation in his autobiography.

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DIMMING THE SUN

The Solution to Pollution Is . . . Pollution?

"Geoengineering holds forth the promise of addressing global warming
concerns for just a few billion dollars a year."

-Newt Gingrich, former speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, 2008 1

"Our science is a drop, our ignorance a sea."

-William James, 1895 2

It's March 201 1 and I have just arrived at a three-day retreat about geoengineering
in the Buckinghamshire countryside, about an hour and a half northwest of
London. The meeting has been convened by the Royal Society, Britain's legendary
academy of science, which has counted among its fellows Isaac Newton, Charles
Darwin, and Stephen Hawking.

In recent years, the society has become the most prominent scientific
organization to argue that, given the lack of progress on emission reduction, the
time has come for governments to prepare a technological Plan B. In a report
published in 2009, it called upon the British government to devote significant
resources to researching which geoengineering methods might prove most
effective. Two years later it declared that planetary- scale engineering interventions
that would block a portion of the sun's rays "may be the only option for reducing

global temperatures quickly in the event of a climate emergency."

The retreat in Buckinghamshire has a relatively narrow focus: How should
research into geoengineering, as well as eventual deployment, be governed? What
rules should researchers follow? What bodies, if any, will regulate these
experiments? National governments? The United Nations? What constitutes "good
governance" of geoengineering? To answer these questions and others, the society

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has teamed up with two cosponsors for the retreat: the World Academy of Sciences
based in Italy, which focuses on promoting scientific opportunities in the
developing world, and the Environmental Defense Fund, which has described

geoengineering as a "bridging tool" (much as it has described natural gas). That
makes this conference both the most international gathering about geoengineering
to date, and the first time a major green group has publicly offered its blessing to
the exploration of radical interventions into the earth's climate system as a
response to global warming.

The venue for this futuristic discussion is an immaculately restored sixty-two-
room redbrick Georgian mansion called Chicheley Hall, once a set in a BBC
production of Pride and Prejudice, and the Royal Society's newly acquired retreat
center. The effect is wildly anachronistic: the estate's sprawling bright green
lawns, framed by elaborately sculpted hedges, seem to cry out for women in
corseted silk gowns and parasols discussing their suitors — not disheveled scientists
discussing a parasol for the planet. And yet geoengineering has always had a
distinctly retro quality, not quite steampunk, but it definitely harkens back to more
confident times, when taking control over the weather seemed like the next
exciting frontier of scientific innovation — not a last-ditch attempt to save ourselves
from incineration. After dinner, consumed under towering oil paintings of plump-
faced men in silver wigs, the delegates are invited to the wood-paneled library.
There, about thirty scientists, lawyers, environmentalists, and policy wonks gather
for the opening "technical briefing" on the different geoengineering schemes under
consideration. A Royal Society scientist takes us through a slide show that includes
"fertilizing" oceans with iron to pull carbon out of the atmosphere; covering
deserts with vast white sheets in order to reflect sunlight back to space; and
building fleets of machines like the ones competing for Richard Branson's Earth
Challenge that would suck carbon out of the air.

The scientist explains that there are too many such schemes to evaluate in depth,
and each presents its own particular governing challenge. So for the next three
days, we will zero in on the geoengineering methods the scientists here consider
most plausible and promising. These involve various means of injecting particles
into the atmosphere in order to reflect more sunlight back to space, thereby
reducing the amount of heat that reaches the earth. In geoengineering lingo, this is
known as Solar Radiation Management (SRM) — since these methods would be
attempting to literally "manage" the amount of sunlight that reaches earth.

There are various possible sun-dimming approaches. The most gleefully sci-fi
is space mirrors, which is quickly dismissed out of hand. Another is "cloud

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brightening": spraying seawater into the sky (whether from fleets of boats or from
towers on shore) to create more cloud cover or to make clouds more reflective and
longer lasting. The most frequently discussed option involves spraying sulfate
aerosols into the stratosphere, whether via specially retrofitted airplanes or a very
long hose suspended by helium balloons (some have even suggested using
cannons). The choice to focus exclusively on SRM is somewhat arbitrary given
that ocean fertilization experiments have been conducted on several occasions,
including a heavily reported "rogue" test off the coast of British Columbia in 2012.
But SRM is attracting the lion's share of serious scientific interest: sun blocking
has been the subject of over one hundred peer-reviewed papers, and several high-
level research teams are poised to run open-air field trials, which would test the
mechanics of these schemes using ships, planes, and very long hoses. If rules and
guidelines aren't developed soon (including, as some are suggesting, banning field
tests outright), we could end up with a research Wild West. 5

Spraying sulfate into the stratosphere is often referred to as "the Pinatubo
Option," after the 1991 eruption of Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines. Most
volcanic eruptions send ash and gases into the lower atmosphere, where sulfuric
acid droplets are formed that simply fall down to earth. (That was the case, for
instance, with the 2010 Icelandic volcano that grounded many European flights.)
But certain, much rarer eruptions — Mount Pinatubo among them — send high
volumes of sulfur dioxide all the way up to the stratosphere.

When that happens, the sulfuric acid droplets don't fall back down: they remain
in the stratosphere, and within weeks can circulate to surround the entire planet.
The droplets act like tiny, light- scattering mirrors, preventing the full heat of the
sun from reaching the planet's surface. When these larger volcanic eruptions occur
in the tropics, the aerosols stay suspended in the stratosphere for roughly one to
two years, and the global cooling effects can last even longer.

That's what happened after Pinatubo. The year after the eruption, global
temperatures dropped by half a degree Celsius, and as Oliver Morton noted
in Nature, "Had there not been a simultaneous El Nino, 1992 would have been 0.7
degrees cooler, worldwide, than 1991." That figure is notable because we have
warmed the earth by roughly the same amount thus far with our greenhouse gas
emissions. Which is why some scientists have become convinced that if they could
just find a way to do artificially what those large eruptions do naturally, then they
could force down the temperature of the earth to counteract global warming.

The scientist leading the briefing starts with the pros of this approach. He
observes that the technology to pull this off already exists, though it needs to be

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tested; it's relatively cheap; and, if it worked, the cooling effects would kick in
pretty quickly. The cons are that, depending on which sun-blocking method is used
and how intensively, a permanent haze could appear over the earth, potentially

making clear blue skies a thing of the past. The haze could prevent astronomers
from seeing the stars and planets clearly and weaker sunlight could reduce the
capacity of solar power generators to produce energy (irony alert).

But the biggest problem with the Pinatubo Option is that it does nothing to
change the underlying cause of climate change, the buildup of heat-trapping gases,
and instead treats only the most obvious symptom — warmer temperatures. That
might help control something like glacial melt, but would do nothing about the
increased atmospheric carbon that the ocean continues to soak up, causing rapid
acidification that is already taking a heavy toll on hard-shelled marine life from
coral to oysters, and may have cascading impacts through the entire aquatic food
chain. On the other hand, we hear, there could be some advantages to allowing
atmospheric carbon dioxide levels to increase while keeping temperatures
artificially cool, since plants like carbon dioxide (so long as it's not accompanied
by scorching heat and drought) and they might well do better in what would
essentially become an artificial global greenhouse.

Oh, and another con: once you start spraying material into the stratosphere to
block the sun, it would basically be impossible to stop because if you did, all the
warming that you had artificially suppressed by putting up that virtual sunshade
would hit the planet's surface in one single tidal wave of heat, with no time for
gradual adaptation. Think of the wicked witches of fairy tales, staying young by
drinking ill-gotten magical elixirs, only to decay and wither all at once when the
supply is abruptly cut off. One solution to this "termination problem," as our
British guide politely describes it, would be to suck a whole lot of carbon out of
the atmosphere while the shade was still up so that when the particles dissipate and
the sun beams down full bore, there is less heat-trapping gas in the atmosphere to
augment the warming. Which would be fine except for the fact that we don't
actually know how to do that on anything close to the required scale (as Richard
Branson has discovered). Listening to all this, a grim picture emerges. Nothing on
earth would be outside the reach of humanity's fallible machines, or even fully
outside at all. We would have a roof, not a sky — a milky, geoengineered ceiling
gazing down on a dying, acidified sea.

And it gets worse, because our guide has saved the biggest con for last. A slide
comes up showing a map of the world, with regions color-coded based on
projections showing how severely their rainfall will be affected by injecting sulfur

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dioxide into the stratosphere. Precipitation in Europe and North America appears
minimally changed, but Africa's equatorial region is lit up red, an indication of
serious drought. And though the borders are hazy, parts of Asia appear to be in
trouble as well because the drop in land temperature caused by a weaker sun could
also weaken the summer monsoons, the main source of rainfall in these regions.

Up to this point, the audience has been quietly listening, but this news seems to
wake up the room. One participant interrupts the presentation: "Let's put aside the
science and talk about the ethics," he says, clearly upset. "I come from Africa and
I don't like what I'm seeing with precipitation." Indeed, one of the society's own
reports on geoengineering acknowledges that Solar Radiation Management "could
conceivably lead to climate changes that are worse than the 'no SRM' option."

The African delegate shakes his head. "I don't know how many of us will sleep
well tonight."

Warming Up to "Horrifying"

Schemes for deliberately intervening in the climate system to counteract the effects
of global warming have been around for half a century at least. In fact, when the
President's Science Advisory Committee issued a report warning Lyndon B.
Johnson about climate change in 1965, the authors made no mention of cutting
emissions. The only potential solutions considered were technological schemes

like modifying clouds and littering oceans with reflective particles.

And well before it was seen as a potential weapon against global warming,
weather modification was simply seen as a weapon. During the Cold War, U.S.
physicists imagined weakening the nation's enemies by stealthily manipulating
rainfall patterns, whether by causing droughts or by generating targeted storms that
would turn a critical supply route into a flooded mess, as was attempted during the
Vietnam War. 12

So it's little wonder that mainstream climate scientists have, until quite recently,
shied away from even discussing geoengineering. In addition to the Dr.
Strangelove baggage, there was a widespread fear of creating a climate moral
hazard. Just as bankers take greater risks when they know governments will bail
them out, the fear was that the mere suggestion of an emergency techno-fix —
however dubious and distant — would feed the dangerous but prevalent belief that
we can keep ramping up our emissions for another couple of decades.

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More out of despair than conviction, the geoengineering taboo has been
gradually eroding over the past decade. A significant turning point came in 2006
when Paul Crutzen, who won the Nobel Prize in chemistry for his breakthrough
research on the deterioration of the ozone layer, wrote an essay arguing that the
time had come to consider injecting sulfur into the stratosphere as an emergency
escape route from severe global warming. "If sizeable reductions in greenhouse
gas emissions will not happen and temperatures rise rapidly, then climatic
engineering ... is the only option available to rapidly reduce temperature rises and
counteract other climatic effects," he wrote. 11

Crutzen created some space for preliminary research to take place, but
geoengineering' s real breakthrough came after the Copenhagen summit flopped in
2009, the same year that climate legislation tanked in the U.S. Senate. Soaring
levels of hope had been pinned on both processes and when neither panned out,
would-be planet hackers came out of their labs, positioning even the most
seemingly outlandish ideas as the only realistic options left — especially with a
world economic crisis making costly energy transformations seem politically
untenable. The Pinatubo Option has become a media favorite thanks in large part
to the work of Nathan Myhrvold, the excitable former Microsoft chief technology
officer who now runs Intellectual Ventures, a company that specializes in eclectic
high-tech inventions and is often described as a vehicle for patent

trolling. Myhrvold is a made-for-TV character — a child prodigy turned physicist
turned tech star, as well as an avid dinosaur hunter and wildlife photographer. Not
to mention a formally trained amateur cook who spent millions researching and
co-writing a six- volume bible on molecular gastronomy.

In 2009, Myhrvold and his team unveiled details for a contraption they called
the "StratoShield," which would use helium balloons to suspend a sulfur dioxide-
spraying tube thirty kilometers into the sky. And he wasted no time pitching it as
a substitute for government action: just two days after the Copenhagen summit
concluded, Myhrvold was on CNN boasting that his device — which he said could
deliver a "Mount Pinatubo on demand" — had the power to "negate global warming

as we have it today."

Two months earlier, Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner's global
bestseller SuperFreakonomics had come out, devoting an entire awestruck chapter
to Myhrvold' s hose to the sky. And whereas most scientists engaged in this
research are careful to present sun blocking as a worst-case scenario — a Plan B to
be employed only if Plan A (emission cuts) proves insufficient — Levitt and
Dubner declared that the Pinatubo Option was straight- up preferable to getting off

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fossil fuels. "For anyone who loves cheap and simple solutions, things don't get

much better." Most of those calling for more geoengineering research do so with
significantly less glee. In September 2010, the New America Foundation
and Slate magazine held a one-day forum in Washington, D.C., titled
"Geoengineering: The Horrifying Idea Whose Time Has Come?"~ That one
sentence pretty much sums up the tone of grim resignation that has characterized
the steady stream of conferences and government reports that have inched
geoengineering into the political mainstream.

This gathering at Chicheley Hall is another milestone in this gradual process of
normalization. Rather than debate whether or not to engage in geoengineering
research — as most previous gatherings have done — this conference seems to take
some kind of geoengineering activity as a given (or else why would it need to be
"governed"). Adding to the sense not just of inevitability but general banality, the
organizers have even given this process a clunky acronym: SRMGI, the Solar
Radiation Management Governance Initiative.

Geoengineering debate generally takes place within a remarkably small and
incestuous world, with the same group of scientists, inventors, and funders
promoting each other's work and making the rounds to virtually every relevant
discussion of the topic. (Science journalist Eli Kintisch, who wrote one of the first
books on geoengineering, calls them the "Geoclique.") And many of the members
of that clique are in attendance here. There is David Keith, the wiry, frenetic
physicist, then at the University of Calgary (now at Harvard), whose academic
work has a major focus on SRM, and whose carbon-sucking machine — blessed by
both Richard Branson and Bill Gates — stands to make him rather rich should the
idea of a techno fix for global warming take off. This kind of vested interest is a
recurring theme: many of the most aggressive advocates of geoengineering
research are associated with planet-hacking start-ups, or hold patents on various
methods. This, says Colby College science historian James Fleming, gives them
"skin in the game" since these scientists stand "to make an incredible amount of
money if their technique goes forward."

Here too is Ken Caldeira, a prominent atmospheric scientist from the Carnegie
Institution for Science, and one of the first serious climate scientists to run
computer models examining the impact of deliberately dimming the sun. In
addition to his academic work, Caldeira has an ongoing relationship with Nathan

Myhrvold' s Intellectual Ventures as a "Senior Inventor." Another player present
is Phil Rasch, a climate scientist at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in

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Washington state, who has been preparing to launch perhaps the first cloud-
brightening field experiment.

Bill Gates isn't here, but he provided much of the cash for the gathering,
allocated through a fund administered by Keith and Caldeira. Gates has given the
scientists at least $4.6 million specifically for climate-related research that wasn't
getting funding elsewhere. Most of it has gone to geoengineering themes, with
Keith, Caldeira, and Rasch all receiving large shares. Gates is also an investor in
Keith's carbon capture company, as well as in Intellectual Ventures, where his
name appears on several geoengineering patents (alongside Caldeira' s), while
Nathan Myhrvold serves as vice chairman at TerraPower, Gates's nuclear energy
start-up. Branson's Carbon War Room has sent a delegate and is supporting this

1 8

work in various ways. If that all sounds confusing and uncomfortably clubby,
especially for so global and high stakes a venture, well, that's the Geoclique for
you. Because governing geoengineering, as opposed to just testing it, is the focus
of this retreat, the usual club has been temporarily expanded to include several
climate scientists from Africa and Asia, as well as legal ethicists, experts in
international treaties and conventions, and staffers from several green NGOs,
including Greenpeace and WWF-UK (Greenpeace does not support
geoengineering, but WWF-UK has come out in cautious support of "research into

geo-engineering approaches in order to find out what is possible").

The organizers have also invited a couple of outspoken critics. Alan Robock, a
famously gruff white -bearded climatologist from Rutgers University, is here.
When I last saw him in action, he was presenting a slide show titled "20 Reasons
Why Geoengineering May Be a Bad Idea," ranging from "Whitening of the sky"
(#7) to "Rapid warming if deployment stops" (#10). Most provocative is
Australian climate expert Clive Hamilton, who has wondered aloud whether "the
geoengineers [are] modern-day Phaetons, who dare to regulate the sun, and who

must be struck down by Zeus before they destroy the earth?"

In the end, the conference manages to agree on nothing of substance — not even
the need for small-scale field trials to take place. But throwing this group of people
together in a country mansion for three days does make for some interesting
intellectual fireworks.

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What Could Possibly Go Wrong?

After a night's sleep, the guests at Chicheley Hall are ready to dive into the debates.
In a sleek slate-and-glass lecture hall located in the old coach house, the organizers
separate the group into breakout sessions. Everyone receives a sheet of paper with
a triangle on it, and on each point is a different word: "Promote," "Prohibit,"
"Regulate." The instructions say "Mark where you feel your current perspective
best fits on the triangle." Do you want further research into sun-shielding banned?
Aggressively promoted? Promoted with some measure of regulation?

I spend the morning eavesdropping on the different breakouts and before long a
pattern emerges. The scientists already engaged in geoengineering research tend
to categorize their positions somewhere between "regulate" and "promote," while
most everyone else leans toward "prohibit" and "regulate." Several of the
participants express a desire to promote more research, but only to establish that
geoengineering isn't a viable option that we can bank on to save the day. "We
particularly need to know if it's not going to work," one environmentalist pleads
to the scientists in his session. "Right now we're struggling in the dark."

But in one breakout group, things have gone off the rails. A participant flatly
refuses to place his views on the triangle and instead, helps himself to a large piece
of poster paper. On it he writes three questions in blue marker:

• Is the human that gave us the climate crisis capable of properly/safely regulating

SRM?

• In considering SRM regulation, are we not in danger of perpetuating the view that

the earth can be manipulated in our interests?

• Don't we have to engage with these questions before we place ourselves in the

triangle?

When the groups come back together to discuss their triangular mind maps, these
questions are never acknowledged, let alone answered. They just hang on the wall
of the lecture hall as a sort of silent rebuke. It's too bad, because the Royal Society,
with its long and storied history of helping to both launch the Scientific Revolution
and the age of fossil fuels, offers a unique vantage point from which to ponder
these matters.

The Royal Society was founded in 1660 as an homage to Francis Bacon. Not
only is the organization's motto — Nullius in verba — "take nothing on authority" —
inspired by Bacon but, somewhat bizarrely, much of the society's basic structure
was modeled on the fictional scientific society portrayed in Bacon's proto-sci-
fi/utopian novel New Atlantis, published in 1627. The institution was at the

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forefront of Britain's colonial project, sponsoring voyages by Captain James Cook
(including the one in which he laid claim to New Zealand), and for over forty years
the Royal Society was led by one of Cook's fellow explorers, the wealthy botanist
Joseph Banks, described by a British colonial official as "the staunchest imperialist

of the day." During his tenure, the society counted among its fellows James Watt,
the steam engine pioneer, and his business partner, Matthew Boulton — the two
men most responsible for launching the age of coal.

As the questions hanging on the wall imply, these are the tools and the logic that
created the crisis geoengineering is attempting to solve — not just the coal-burning
factories and colonial steam ships, but Bacon's twisted vision of the Earth as a
prone woman and Watt's triumphalism at having found her "weak side." Given
this, does it really make sense to behave as if, with big enough brains and powerful
enough computers, humans can master and control the climate crisis just as
humans have been imagining they could master the natural world since the dawn
of industrialization — digging, damming, drilling, dyking. Is it really as simple as
adding a new tool to our nature-taming arsenal: dimming?

This is the strange paradox of geoengineering. Yes, it is exponentially more
ambitious and more dangerous than any engineering project humans have ever
attempted before. But it is also very familiar, nearly a cliche, as if the past five
hundred years of human history have been leading us, ineluctably, to precisely this
place. Unlike cutting our emissions in line with the scientific consensus,
succumbing to the logic of geoengineering does not require any change from us; it
just requires that we keep doing what we have done for centuries, only much more
so.

Wandering the perfectly manicured gardens at Chicheley Hall — through the
trees sculpted into lollipops, through the hedges chiseled into daggers — I realize
that what scares me most is not the prospect of living on a "designer planet," to
use a phrase I heard at an earlier geoengineering conference. My fear is that the
real-world results will be nothing like this garden, or even like anything we saw in
that technical briefing, but rather something far, far worse. If we respond to a
global crisis caused by our pollution with more pollution — by trying to fix the crud
in our lower atmosphere by pumping a different kind of crud into the
stratosphere — then geoengineering might do something far more dangerous than
tame the last vestiges of "wild" nature. It may cause the earth to go wild in ways
we cannot imagine, making geoengineering not the final engineering frontier,
another triumph to commemorate on the walls of the Royal Society, but the last
tragic act in this centuries-long fairy tale of control.

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A great many of our most brilliant scientists have taken the lessons of past
engineering failures to heart, including the failure of foresight represented by
climate change itself, which is one of the primary reasons there is still so much
resistance to geoengineering among biologists and climate scientists. To quote
Sallie Chisholm, a world-renowned expert on marine microbes at MIT,
"Proponents of research on geoengineering simply keep ignoring the fact that the
biosphere is a player (not just a responder) in whatever we do, and its trajectory
cannot be predicted. It is a living breathing collection of organisms (mostly
microorganisms) that are evolving every second — a 'self-organizing, complex,
adaptive system' (the strict term). These types of systems have emergent properties
that simply cannot be predicted. We all know this! Yet proponents of

geoengineering research leave that out of the discussion."

Indeed in my time spent among the would-be geoengineers, I have been
repeatedly struck by how the hard- won lessons about humility before nature that
have reshaped modern science, particularly the fields of chaos and complexity
theory, do not appear to have penetrated this particular bubble. On the contrary,
the Geoclique is crammed with overconfident men prone to complimenting each
other on their fearsome brainpower. At one end you have Bill Gates, the
movement' s sugar daddy, who once remarked that it was difficult for him to decide
which was more important, his work on computer software or inoculations,
because they both rank "right up there with the printing press and fire." At the
other end is Russ George, the U.S. entrepreneur who has been labeled a "rogue
geoengineer" for dumping some one hundred tons of iron sulphate off the coast of
British Columbia in 2012. "I am the champion of this on the planet," he declared
after the experiment was exposed, the only one with the guts to "step forward to
save the oceans." In the middle are scientists like David Keith, who often comes
off as deeply conflicted about "opening up Pandora's Box" — but once said of the
threat of weakened monsoons from Solar Radiation Management that

"hydrological stresses" can be managed "a little bit by irrigation."

The ancients called this hubris; the great American philosopher, farmer and poet
Wendell Berry calls it "arrogant ignorance," adding, "We identify arrogant
ignorance by its willingness to work on too big a scale, and thus to put too much

*24

at risk."

It doesn't provide much reassurance that just two weeks before we all gathered
at Chicheley Hall, three nuclear reactors at Fukushima melted down in the wake
of a powerful tsunami. The story was still leading the news the entire time we met.
And yet the extent to which the would-be geoengineers acknowledged the disaster

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was only to worry that opponents of nuclear energy would seize upon the crisis to
block new reactors. They never entertained the idea that Fukushima might serve
as a cautionary tale for their own high-risk engineering ambitions.

Which brings us back to that slide showing parts of Africa lit up red that caused
such a stir on opening night: is it possible that geoengineering, far from a quick
emergency fix, could make the impacts of climate change even worse for a great
many people? And if so, who is most at risk and who gets to decide to take those
risks?

Like Climate Change, Volcanoes Do Discriminate

Boosters of Solar Radiation Management tend to speak obliquely about the
"distributional consequences" of injecting sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere, and
of the "spatial heterogeneity" of the impacts. Petra Tschakert, a geographer at Penn
State University, calls this jargon "a beautiful way of saying that some countries

are going to get screwed." But which countries? And screwed precisely how?

Having reliable answers to those key questions would seem like a prerequisite
for considering deployment of such a world-altering technology. But it's not at all
clear that obtaining those answers is even possible. Keith and Myhrvold can test
whether a hose or an airplane is a better way to get sulfur dioxide into the
stratosphere. Others can spray saltwater from boats or towers and see if it brightens
clouds. But you'd have to deploy these methods on a scale large enough to impact
the global climate system to be certain about how, for instance, spraying sulfur in
the Arctic or the tropics will impact rainfall in the Sahara or southern India. But
that wouldn't be a test of geoengineering; it would actually be conducting

geoengineering. Nor could the necessary answers be found from a brief
geoengineering stint — pumping sulfur for, say, one year. Because of the huge
variations in global weather patterns from one year to the next (some monsoon
seasons are naturally weaker than others, for instance), as well as the havoc already
being wreaked by global warming, it would be impossible to connect a particular
storm or drought to an act of geoengineering. Sulfur injections would need to be
maintained long enough for a clear pattern to be isolated from both natural
fluctuations and the growing impacts of greenhouse gases. That likely means

*27

keeping the project running for a decade or more.

As Martin Bunzl, a Rutgers philosopher and climate change expert, points out,
these facts alone present an enormous, perhaps insurmountable ethical problem for

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geoengineering. In medicine, he writes, "You can test a vaccine on one person,
putting that person at risk, without putting everyone else at risk." But with
geoengineering, "You can't build a scale model of the atmosphere or tent off part
of the atmosphere. As such you are stuck going directly from a model to full scale
planetary- wide implementation." In short, you could not conduct meaningful tests
of these technologies without enlisting billions of people as guinea pigs — for years.
Which is why science historian James Fleming calls geoengineering schemes

"untested and untestable, and dangerous beyond belief."

Computer models can help, to be sure. That's how we get our best estimates of
how earth systems will be impacted by the emission of greenhouse gases. And it's
straightforward enough to add a different kind of emission — sulfur in the
stratosphere — to those models and see how the results change. Several research
teams have done just that, with some very disturbing results. Alan Robock, for
instance, has run different SRM scenarios through supercomputers. The findings
of a 2008 paper he coauthored in the Journal of Geophysical Research were blunt:
sulfur dioxide injections "would disrupt the Asian and African summer monsoons,
reducing precipitation to the food supply for billions of people." Those monsoons
provide precious freshwater to an enormous share of the world's population. India
alone receives between 70 and 90 percent of its total annual rainfall during its June

through September monsoon season.

Robock and his colleagues aren't the only ones coming up with these alarming
projections. Several research teams have produced models that show significant
losses of rainfall as a result of SRM and other sunlight-reflecting geoengineering
methods. One 2012 study shows a 20 percent reduction in rainfall in some areas of
the Amazon after a particularly extreme use of SRM. When another team modeled
spraying sulfur from points in the Northern Hemisphere for a 2013 study, the
results projected a staggering 60-100 percent drop in a key measure of plant
productivity in the African countries of the Sahel (Burkina Faso, Chad, Mali,
Niger, Senegal, and Sudan) — that means, potentially, a complete crop collapse in

some areas. This is not some minor side effect or "unintended consequence." If
only some of these projections were to come true, that would transform a process
being billed as an emergency escape from catastrophic climate change into a mass
killer in its own right.

One might think all of this alarming research would be enough to put a serious
damper on the upbeat chatter surrounding the Pinatubo Option. The problem is
that — though computer models have proven remarkably accurate at predicting the
broad patterns of climate change — they are not infallible. As we have seen from

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the failure to anticipate the severity of summer sea ice loss in the Arctic as well as
the rate of global sea level rise in recent decades, computer models have tended to

underestimate certain risks, and overstate others. Most significantly, climate
models are at their weakest when predicting specific regional impacts — how much
more southern Somalia will warm than the central United States, say, or the precise
extent to which drought will impact crop production in India or Australia. This
uncertainty has allowed some would-be geoengineers to scoff at findings that make
SRM look like a potential humanitarian disaster, insisting that regional climate
models are inherently unreliable, while simultaneously pointing to other models
that show more reassuring results. And if the controversy were just a matter of
dueling computer models, perhaps we could call it a draw. But that is not the case.

History as Teacher — and Warning

Without being able to rely on either models or field tests, only one tool remains to
help forecast the risks of sun blocking, and it is distinctly low-tech. That tool is
history, specifically the historical record of weather patterns following major
volcanic eruptions. The relevance of history is something all sides of the debate
appear to agree on. Ken Caldeira has described the 1991 eruption of Mount
Pinatubo "as a natural test of some of the concepts underlying solar radiation
management" since it sent so much sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere. And David
Keith assured me, "It's pretty clear that just putting a lot of sulfur in the
stratosphere isn't terrible. After all, volcanoes do it." Likewise, Lowell Wood,
Myhrvold' s partner in the invention of the StratoShield, has argued that because
his hose-to-the-sky would attempt to imitate a natural volcano, there is "a proof of

harmlessness."

Levitt and Dubner have stressed the relevance of historical precedent most
forcefully, writing in SuperFreakonomics that not only did the earth cool after
Pinatubo, but "forests around the world grew more vigorously because trees prefer
their sunlight a bit diffused. And all that sulfur dioxide in the stratosphere created
some of the prettiest sunsets that people had ever seen." They do not, however,
appear to believe that history offers any cautionary lessons: aside from a reference
to the "relatively small" number of deaths in the immediate aftermath of the
eruption due to storms and mud slides, they make no mention in the book of any

negative impact from Pinatubo.

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Critics of sun shielding also draw on history to bolster their arguments, and when
they look back, they see much more than pretty sunsets and "proof of
harmlessness." In fact, a great deal of compelling research shows a connection
between large volcanic eruptions and precisely the kinds of droughts some
computer models are projecting for SRM. Take the 1991 eruption of Mount
Pinatubo itself. When it erupted, large swaths of Africa were already suffering
from drought due to natural fluctuations. But after the eruption, the situation grew
much worse. In the following year, there was a 20 percent reduction in
precipitation in southern Africa and a 10-15 percent reduction in precipitation in
South Asia. The United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) described the
drought as "the most severe in the last century"; an estimated 120 million people
were affected. The Los Angeles Times reported crop losses of 50-90 percent, and

half the population of Zimbabwe required food aid.

At the time, few linked these disastrous events to the Pinatubo eruption since
isolating such climate signals takes time. But more recent research looking at
rainfall and streamflow patterns from 1950 to 2004 has concluded that only the
sulfur dioxide that Pinatubo sent into the stratosphere can account for the severity
of the drop in rainfall that followed the eruption. Aiguo Dai, an expert in global
drought at the State University of New York, Albany, stresses that though the
drought had additional causes, "Pinatubo contributed significantly to the drying."
A 2007 paper cowritten by Dai and Kevin Trenberth, head of the Climate Analysis
Section at the Colorado-based National Center for Atmospheric Research,
concluded "that the Pinatubo eruption played an important role in the record
decline in land precipitation and discharge, and the associated drought conditions
in 1992."-

If Pinatubo was the only large eruption to have been followed by severe and life-
endangering drought, that might not be enough to draw clear conclusions. But it
fits neatly into a larger pattern. Alan Robock, a leading expert on the effect of
volcanoes on climate, points in particular to two other eruptions — Iceland's Laki
in 1783 and Alaska's Mount Katmai in 1912. Both were sufficiently powerful to
send a high volume of sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere and, like Pinatubo, it
turns out that both were followed by a series of terrible, or badly worsening
regional droughts.

Reliable records of rainfall go back only roughly one hundred years, but as
Robock informed me, "There's one thing that's been measured for 1,500 years,
and that's the flow of the Nile River. And if you look back at the flow of the Nile
River in 1784 or 1785" — the two years following Laki's eruption in Iceland — "it

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was much weaker than normal." The usual floods that could be counted on to carry
water and precious fertilizing nutrients into farmers' fields barely took place, the
devastating consequences of which were recounted in the eighteenth-century travel
memoirs of French historian Constantin-Francois Volney. "Soon after the end of
November, the famine carried off, at Cairo, nearly as many as the plague; the
streets, which before were full of beggars, now afforded not a single one: all had
perished or deserted the city." Volney estimated that in two years, one sixth of the
population in Egypt either died or fled the country.^

Scholars have noted that in the years immediately following the eruption,
drought and famine gripped Japan and India, claiming millions of lives, although
there is much debate and uncertainty surrounding Laki's contribution. In Western
and Central Europe, meanwhile, a brutally cold winter led to flooding and high
mortality rates. Expert estimates of the global death toll from the eruption and the
resulting extreme weather range widely, from over one-and-a-half million to as
many as six million people. At a time when world population was less than one
billion, those are stunningly high numbers, making Laki quite possibly the

deadliest volcano in recorded history.^

Robock found something similar when he delved into the aftermath of the 1912
Katmai eruption in Alaska. Once again, his team looked at the historical record of
the flow of the Nile and discovered that the year after Katmai saw "the lowest flow
for the twentieth century." Robock and his colleagues also "had found a significant
weakening of the Indian monsoon in response to the 1912 Katmai volcanic
eruption in Alaska, which resulted from the decreased temperature gradient
between Asia and the Indian Ocean." But it was in Africa where the impact of the
great eruption took the heaviest human toll. In Nigeria, sorghum, millet, and rice
crops withered in the fields while speculators hoarded what grains survived. The
result was a massive famine in 1913-1914 that took the lives of at least 125,000 in

western Africa alone.

These are not the only examples of deadly droughts seemingly triggered by large
volcanic eruptions. Robock has looked at how such eruptions have impacted "the
water supply for Sahel and northern Africa" over the past two thousand years.
"You get the same story from every [eruption] you look at," he said, adding, "there
haven't been that many big eruptions but they all tell you the same stories.. . . The
global average precipitation went down. In fact, if you look at global average
precipitation for the last fifty years, the three years with the lowest global
precipitation were after the three largest volcanic eruptions. Agung in 1963, El
Chichon in 1982, and Pinatubo in 1991." The connections are so clear, Robock

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and two coauthors argued in one paper, that the next time there is a large "high-
latitude volcanic eruption," policymakers should start preparing food aid
immediately, "allowing society time to plan for and remediate the

consequences."

So how, given all this readily available evidence, could geoengineering boosters
invoke the historical record for "proof of harmlessness"? The truth is the mirror
opposite: of all the extreme events the planet periodically lobs our way — from
earthquakes and tsunamis to hurricanes and floods — powerful volcanic eruptions
may well be the most threatening to human life. Because the people in the
immediate path of an eruption are not the only ones at risk; the lives of billions of
others scattered throughout the globe can be destroyed by lack of food and water
in the drier years to come. No naturally occurring disaster short of an asteroid has
such global reach.

This grim track record makes the cheerful talk of a Pinatubo Option distinctly
bizarre, if not outright sinister — especially because what is being contemplated is
simulating the cooling effects of an eruption like Pinatubo not once but year after
year for decades, which could obviously magnify the significant risks that have
been documented in the aftermath of one-off eruptions.

The risks can be debated and contested, of course — and they are. The most
common response is that, yes, there could be negative impacts, but not as negative
as the impacts of climate change itself. David Keith goes further, arguing that we
have the power to effectively minimize the risks with appropriate design; he
proposes an SRM program that would slowly ramp up and then down again, "in
combination with cutting emissions and with a goal to reduce — but not eliminate —
the rate of temperature rise." As he explains in his 2013 book, A Case for Climate
Engineering, "Crop losses, heat stress and flooding are the impacts of climate
change that are likely to fall most harshly on the world [sic] poorest. The moderate
amounts of geoengineering contemplated in this slow ramp scenario are likely to
reduce each of these impacts over the next half century, and so it will benefit the
poor and politically disadvantaged who are most vulnerable to rapid environmental
change. This potential for reducing climate risk is the reason I take geoengineering

i „40

seriously.

But when climate models and the historical record tell such a similar story about
what could go wrong (and of course it wouldn't be scientists but politicians
deciding how to use these technologies), there is ample cause for focusing on the
very real risks. Trenberth and Dai, authors of the study on Pinatubo' s harrowing
legacy, are blunt. "The central concern with geoengineering fixes to global

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warming is that the cure could be worse than the disease." And they stress,
"Creating a risk of widespread drought and reduced freshwater resources for the

world to cut down on global warming does not seem like an appropriate fix."

It's hard not to conclude that the willingness of many geoegineering boosters to
gloss over the extent of these risks, and in some cases, to ignore them entirely, has
something to do with who appears to be most vulnerable. After all, if the historical
record, backed by multiple models, indicated that injecting sulfur into the
stratosphere would cause widespread drought and famine in North America and
Germany, as opposed to the Sahel and India, is it likely that this Plan B would be
receiving such serious consideration?

It's true that it might be technically possible to conduct geoengineering in a way
that distributed the risks more equitably. For instance, the same 2013 study that
found that the African Sahel could be devastated by SRM done in the Northern
Hemisphere — a common assumption about where the sulfur injections would take
place — found that the Sahel could actually see an increase in rainfall if the
injections happened in the Southern Hemisphere instead. However, in this
scenario, the United States and the Caribbean could see a 20 percent increase in
hurricane frequency, and northeastern Brazil could see its rainfall plummet. In
other words, it might be possible to tailor some of these technologies to help the
most vulnerable people on the planet, and those who contributed least to the
creation of the climate crisis — but not without endangering some of the wealthiest
and most powerful regions. So we are left with a question less about technology
than about politics: does anyone actually believe that geoengineering will be used
to help Africa if that help could come only by putting North America at greater

risk of extreme weather?

In contrast, it is all too easy to imagine scenarios wherein geoengineering could
be used in a desperate bid to, say, save corn crops in South Dakota, even if it very
likely meant sacrificing rainfall in South Sudan. And we can imagine it because
wealthy-country governments are already doing this, albeit more passively, by
allowing temperatures to increase to levels that are a danger to hundreds of millions
of people, mostly in the poorest parts of the world, rather than introducing policies
that interfere with short-term profits. This is why African delegates at U.N. climate
summits have begun using words like "genocide" to describe the collective failure
to lower emissions. And why Mary Ann Lucille Sering, climate change secretary
for the Philippines, told the 2013 summit in Warsaw, Poland, "I am beginning to
feel like we are negotiating on who is to live and who is to die." Rob Nixon, an
author and University of Wisconsin English professor, has evocatively described

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the brutality of climate change as a form of "slow violence"; geoengineering could

well prove to be a tool to significantly speed that up.

Geoengineering as Shock Doctrine

All of this may still seem somewhat abstract but it's critical to reckon with these
harrowing risks now. That's because if geoengineering were ever deployed, it
would almost surely be in an atmosphere of collective panic with scarce time for
calm deliberation. Its defenders readily concede as much. Bill Gates describes
geoengineering as "just an insurance policy," something to have "in the back
pocket in case things happen faster." Nathan Myhrvold likens SRM to "having fire
sprinklers in a building" — you hope you won't need it, "but you also need

something to fall back on in case the fire occurs anyway."

In a true emergency, who would be immune to this logic? Certainly not me.
Sure, the idea of spraying sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere like some kind of
cosmic umbrella seems crazy to me now. But if my city were so hot that people
were dropping dead in the thousands, and someone was peddling a quick and dirty
way to cool it off, wouldn't I beg for that relief in the same way that I reach for the
air conditioner on a sweltering day, knowing full well that by turning it on I am
contributing to the very problem I am trying to escape?

This is how the shock doctrine works: in the desperation of a true crisis all kinds
of sensible opposition melts away and all manner of high-risk behaviors seem
temporarily acceptable. It is only outside of a crisis atmosphere that we can
rationally evaluate the future ethics and risks of deploying geoengineering
technologies should we find ourselves in a period of rapid change. And what those
risks tell us is that dimming the sun is nothing like installing a sprinkler system —
unless we are willing to accept that some of those sprinklers could very well spray
gasoline instead of water. Oh — and that, once turned on, we might not be able to
turn off the system without triggering an inferno that could burn down the entire
building. If someone sold you a sprinkler like that, you'd definitely want a refund.

Perhaps we do need to find out all we possibly can about these technologies,
knowing that we will never know close to enough to deploy them responsibly. But
if we accept that logic, we also have to accept that small field tests often turn into
bigger ones. It may start with just checking the deployment hardware, but how
long before the planet hackers want to see if they can change the temperature in

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just one remote, low-population location (something that will be described, no
doubt, as "the middle of nowhere") — and then one a little less remote?

The past teaches us that once serious field tests begin, deployment is rarely far
behind. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were bombed less than a month after Trinity, the
first successful nuclear test — despite the fact that many of the scientists involved
in the Manhattan Project thought they were building a nuclear bomb that would be
used only as a deterrent. And though slamming the door on any kind of knowledge
is always wrenching, it's worth remembering that we have collectively foregone
certain kinds of research before, precisely because we understand that the risks are
too great. One hundred and sixty-eight nations are party to a treaty banning the
development of biological weapons. The same taboos have been attached to
research into eugenics because it can so easily become a tool to marginalize and
even eliminate whole groups of people. Moreover the U.N. Environmental
Modification Convention, which was adopted by governments in the late 1970s,
already bans the use of weather modification as a weapon — a prohibition that
today's would-be geoengineers are skirting by insisting that their aims are peaceful
(even if their work could well feel like an act of war to billions).

Monster Earth

Not all geoengineering advocates dismiss the grave dangers their work could
unleash. But many simply shrug that life is full of risks — and just as
geoengineering is attempting to fix a problem created by industrialization, some
future fix will undoubtedly solve the problems created by geoengineering.

One version of the "we'll fix it later" argument that has gained a good deal of
traction comes from the French sociologist Bruno Latour. His argument is that
humanity has failed to learn the lessons of the prototypical cautionary story about
playing god: Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. According to Latour, Shelley's real
lesson is not, as is commonly understood, "don't mess with mother nature." Rather
it is, don't run away from your technological mess-ups, as young Dr. Frankenstein
did when he abandoned the monster to which he had given life. Instead, Latour
says we must stick around and continue to care for our "monsters" like the deities
that we have become. "The real goal must be to have the same type of patience and
commitment to our creations as God the Creator, Himself," he writes, concluding,
"From now on, we should stop flagellating ourselves and take up explicitly and
seriously what we have been doing all along at an ever-increasing scale." (British

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environmentalist Mark Lynas makes a similar, defiantly hubristic argument in

calling on us to become "The God Species" in his book of the same name.)

Latour's entreaty to "love your monsters" has become a rallying cry in certain
green circles, particularly among those most determined to find climate solutions
that adhere to market logic. And the idea that our task is to become more
responsible Dr. Frankensteins, ones who don't flee our creations like deadbeat
dads, is unquestionably appealing. But it's a terribly poor metaphor for
geoengineering. First, "the monster" we are being asked to love is not some mutant
creature of the laboratory but the earth itself. We did not create it; it created — and
sustains — us. The earth is not our prisoner, our patient, our machine, or, indeed,
our monster. It is our entire world. And the solution to global warming is not to fix
the world, it is to fix ourselves.

Because geoengineering will certainly monsterize the planet as nothing
experienced in human history. We very likely would not be dealing with a single
geoengineering effort but some noxious brew of mixed-up techno-fixes — sulfur in
space to cool the temperature, cloud seeding to fix the droughts it causes, ocean
fertilization in a desperate gambit to cope with acidification, and carbon- sucking
machines to help us get off the geo-junk once and for all.

This makes geoengineering the very antithesis of good medicine, whose goal is
to achieve a state of health and equilibrium that requires no further intervention.
These technologies, by contrast, respond to the lack of balance our pollution has
created by taking our ecosystems even further away from self-regulation. We
would require machines to constantly pump pollution into the stratosphere and
would be unable to stop unless we invented other machines that could suck existing
pollution out of the lower atmosphere, then store and monitor that waste
indefinitely. If we sign on to this plan and call it stewardship, we effectively give
up on the prospect of ever being healthy again. The earth — our life support
system — would itself be put on life support, hooked up to machines 24/7 to prevent
it from going full-tilt monster on us.

And the risks are greater still because we might well be dealing with multiple
countries launching geoengineering efforts at once, creating unknown and
unknowable interactions. In other words, a Frankenstein world, in which we try to
solve one problem by making new ones, then pile techno-fixes onto those. And
almost no one seems to want to talk about what happens if our geoengineering
operations are interrupted for some reason — by war, terrorist attack, mechanical
failure, or extreme weather. Or what if, in the middle of simulating the effects of a
Mount Pinatubo-like eruption, a real Mount Pinatubo erupts. Would we risk

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bringing on what David Keith has described as "a worldwide Ice Age, a snowball
earth," just because we forgot, yet again, that we are not actually in the driver's

seat? 4 ^

The dogged faith in technology's capacity to allow us to leapfrog out of crisis is
born of earlier technological breakthroughs — splitting the atom or putting a man
on the moon. And some of the players pushing most aggressively for a techno-fix
for climate change were directly involved in those earlier technological triumphs —
like Lowell Wood, who helped develop advanced nuclear weaponry, or Gates and
Myrhvold, who revolutionized computing. But as longtime sustainability expert
Ed Ayres wrote in God's Last Offer, the "if we can put a man on the moon"
boosterism "glosses over the reality that building rockets and building livable
communities are two fundamentally different endeavors: the former required
uncanny narrow focus; the latter must engage a holistic view. Building a livable

world isn't rocket science; it's far more complex than that."

Have We Really Tried Plan A?

On day two of the geoengineering retreat at Chicheley Hall, a spirited debate
breaks out about whether the U.N. has any role to play in governing
geoengineering experiments. The scientists anxious to get their field tests off the
ground are quickest to dismiss the institution, fearing an unwieldy process that
would tie their hands. The participants from NGOs are not quite ready to throw out
the institution that has been the primary forum for climate governance, flawed as
it is.

Just when things are getting particularly heated, there is a commotion outside
the glass doors of the lecture hall.

A fleet of brand-new luxury cars has pulled up outside and a retinue of people —
noticeably better dressed than the ones in the geoengineering session — pile out,
their polished wingtips and high heels crunching noisily on the gravel pathways.
One of our hosts from the Royal Society explains that for the rest of the day,
another retreat put on by the auto company Audi will also be holding its sessions
in the refurbished coach house. I peek outside and notice that several signs bearing
Audi's Olympics-like logo have appeared along the driveway.

For the rest of the afternoon, our tense discussions about the ethics of blocking
the sun are periodically interrupted by loud cheers coming from next door. The
reason for the cheering is, we are told, a corporate secret, but the team from Audi

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is obviously very happy about something — next season's models, perhaps, or
maybe sales figures.

The Royal Society regularly rents out Chicheley Hall for corporate retreats and
Downton Abbey-inspired weddings so the fact that these two meetings are taking
place cheek-by-jowl in a country mansion is, of course, pure coincidence. Still,
separated by nothing more than a thin sliding wall, it's hard not to feel that the
angsty would-be geoengineers and the carefree German car sellers are in
conversation with each other — as if, more than anything, the reckless experiments
the people in our room are attempting to rationalize are really about allowing the
car people in the next room to keep their party going.

The mind has a habit of making connections out of random proximate events,
but in this case, it's not entirely random. There is no doubt that some of the people
pushing geoengineering see these technologies not as emergency bridges away
from fossil fuels, but as a means to keep the fossil fuel frenzy going for as long as
possible. Nathan Myhrvold, for one, has even proposed using the mountains of
yellow sulfur that are produced as waste in the Alberta tar sands to shield the sun,
which would conveniently allow the oil majors to keep digging and drilling
indefinitely. "You could put one little pumping facility up there, and with one
corner of one of those sulfur mountains, you could solve the whole global warming
problem for the Northern Hemisphere." And David Keith's start-up company
Carbon Engineering has not only Bill Gates as an investor, but also Murray
Edwards, whose oil company Canadian Natural Resources is one of the biggest
players in the tar sands.~

Neither of these is an isolated case. Corporations that either dig up fossil fuels
or that, like car companies, are responsible for a disproportionate share of their
combustion, have a long track record of promoting geoengineering as a response
to climate change, one that they clearly see as preferable to stopping their pollution.
This goes as far back as 1992, when the National Academy of Sciences
copublished a controversial report titledPo/zcy Implications of Greenhouse
Warming. To the consternation of many climate scientists, the document included
a series of geoengineering options, some of them rather outlandish, from sending
fifty thousand mirrors into earth's orbit to putting "billions of aluminized,

hydrogen-filled balloons in the stratosphere to provide a reflective screen."

Adding to the controversy was the fact that this chapter of the report was led by
Robert A. Frosch, then a vice president at General Motors. As he explained at the
time: "I don't know why anybody should feel obligated to reduce carbon dioxide
if there are better ways to do it. When you start making deep cuts, you're talking

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about spending some real money and changing the entire economy. I don't
understand why we're so casual about tinkering with the whole way people live on
the Earth, but not tinkering a little further with the way we influence the

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environment.

And notably, it was BP's chief scientist, Steven Koonin, who convened one of
the first formal scientific gatherings on geoengineering back in 2008. The
gathering produced a report outlining a decade-long research project into climate
modification, with a particular focus on Solar Radiation Management. (Koonin left
BP to work for the Obama administration as the Department of Energy's under
secretary for science.)

It's much the same story at several influential think tanks that are generously
funded with fossil fuel dollars. For instance, over a period of years, as it stoked the
flames of climate change denial, the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) took
millions of dollars in donations from ExxonMobil. It continues to be the top
recipient of money from conservative foundations eager to block climate action,
bringing in at least $86.7 million from those sources since 2003. And yet, in 2008,
the think tank launched a department called the Geoengineering Project. The
project has held several conferences, published multiple reports, and sent experts
to testify before congressional hearings — all with the consistent message that
geoengineering isn't a Plan B should emission cuts fail, but rather a Plan A. Lee
Lane, who for several years was AEFs main spokesperson on the subject,
explained in 2010, "For those of us who believe that climate change might, at some
point, pose a grave threat — and that emissions containment is both costly and
politically impractical — climate engineering is beginning to look like the last, best
hope."-

This position is striking given the think tank's well-documented history of
attacks on climate science and concerted efforts to trash virtually every serious
attempt to regulate emissions, including mild legislation favoring energy- efficient
light bulbs (big government interference in "how we wish to light up our lives," as

one AEI researcher put it).^ Some at the think tank have signaled their openness
to a modest or revenue-neutral carbon tax in recent years, which along with
geoengineering is an increasingly prominent fetish among non-climate-change-
denying Republicans. Still, you would think that turning down the sun for every
person on earth is a more intrusive form of big government than asking citizens to
change their light bulbs. Indeed you would think that pretty much any policy option
would be less intrusive. But that is to miss the point: for the fossil fuel companies

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and their paid champions, anything is preferable to regulating
ExxonMobil, includingattempting to regulate the sun.

The rest of us tend to see things differently, which is why the fact that
geoengineering is being treated so seriously should underline the urgent need for
a real Plan A — one based on emission reduction, however economically radical it
must be. After all, if the danger of climate change is sufficiently grave and
imminent for governments to be considering science-fiction solutions, isn't it also
grave and imminent enough for them to consider just plain science-based
solutions?

Science tells us we need to keep the vast majority of proven fossil fuel reserves
in the ground. It seems reasonable, then, that any government ready to fund
experiments into climate alteration should also be willing, at the very least, to put
a moratorium on new extreme energy development, while providing sufficient
funding for a rapid transition to renewable energy. As the Tyndall Centre's Kevin
Anderson points out, "At the moment we're digging out shale gas and tar sands
and lots of coal. We're going to be digging under the Arctic. We don't need to
concern ourselves too much with geo-engineering for the future, we just need to

stop getting fossil fuels out of the ground today."

And how about some other solutions discussed in these pages — like taking far
larger shares of the profits from the rogue corporations most responsible for
waging war on the climate and using those resources to clean up their mess? Or
reversing energy privatizations to regain control over our grids? We have only the
briefest window in which this strategy is viable, before we need to get off fossil
fuels entirely, so surely it merits discussion.

The Indian author and activist Vandana Shiva, meanwhile, points out that
shifting to an agriculture model based on agro-ecological methods would not only
sequester large amounts of carbon, it would reduce emissions and increase food
security. And unlike geoengineering, "It's not a fifty-year experiment. It's an
assured, guaranteed path that has been shown to work." Admittedly, such
responses break all the free market rules. Then again, so did bailing out the banks
and the auto companies. And they are still not close to as radical as breaking the
primordial link between temperature and atmospheric carbon — all to meet our
desire for planetary air-conditioning.

If we were staring down the barrel of an imminent and unavoidable climate
emergency, the kinds of monstrous calculations implicit in geoengineering —
sacrifice part of Latin America in order to save all of China, or save the remaining
glaciers and land ice to prevent catastrophic global sea level rise but risk

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endangering India's food source — might be unavoidable. But even if we acquire
enough information to make those kinds of calculations (and it's hard to imagine
how we could), we notably are not at that point. We have options, ones that would
greatly decrease the chances of ever confronting those impossible choices, choices
that indeed deserve to be described as genocidal. To fail to exercise those
options — which is exactly what we are collectively doing — knowing full well that
eventually the failure could force government to rationalize "risking" turning
whole nations, even subcontinents, into sacrifice zones, is a decision our children
may judge as humanity's single most immoral act.

The Astronaut's Eye View

There is a photograph from the day Richard Branson launched his $25 million
Virgin Earth Challenge that keeps popping into my head at the
geoengineering retreat. Branson, dressed in black, has a big grin on his face and he
is gleefully tossing a plastic model of Planet Earth into the air as if it were a beach
ball. Al Gore, looking unsure about whether this is a good idea, is standing by his

. , 56

side.

This frozen moment strikes me as the perfect snapshot of the first incarnation of
the climate movement: a wealthy and powerful man with the whole world literally
in his hands, promising to save the fragile blue planet on our behalf. This heroic
feat will be accomplished, he has just announced, by harnessing the power of
human genius and the desire to get really, really rich.

Pretty much everything is wrong with that picture. The reinvention of a major
climate polluter into a climate savior based on little more than good PR. The
assumption that dangling enough money can solve any mess we create. And the
certainty that the solutions to climate change must come from above rather than
below.

But I've begun to think that there is another problem too — it has to do with that
pale blue sphere that Branson was tossing skyward. For more than forty years, the
view of the Earth from space has been the unofficial logo of the environmental
movement — featured on countless T-shirts, pins, and bumper stickers. It is the
thing that we are supposed to protect at U.N. climate conferences, and that we are
called upon to "save" every Earth Day, as if it were an endangered species, or a
starving child far away, or a pet in need of our ministrations. And that idea may be

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just as dangerous as the Baconian fantasy of the earth as a machine for us to master,
since it still leaves us (literally) on top.

When we marvel at that blue marble in all its delicacy and frailty, and resolve to
save the planet, we cast ourselves in a very specific role. That role is of a parent,
the parent of the earth. But the opposite is the case. It is we humans who are fragile
and vulnerable and the earth that is hearty and powerful, and holds us in its hands.
In pragmatic terms, our challenge is less to save the earth from ourselves and more
to save ourselves from an earth that, if pushed too far, has ample power to rock,
burn, and shake us off completely. That knowledge should inform all we do —
especially the decision about whether to gamble on geoengineering.

It wasn't supposed to be this way, of course. In the late 1960s, when NASA shared
the first photographs of the whole earth from space, there was a great deal of
rhapsodizing about how the image would spark a leap in human consciousness.
When we were finally able to see our world as an interconnected and holistic entity
we at last would understand that this lonely planet is our only home and that it is
up to us to be its responsible caretakers. This was "Spaceship Earth" and the great
hope was that being able to see it would cause everyone to grasp what British
economist and author Barbara Ward meant when she said in 1966, "This space
voyage is totally precarious. We depend upon a little envelope of soil and a rather
larger envelope of atmosphere for life itself. And both can be contaminated and

destroyed."

So how did we get from that humility before life's precariousness to Branson's
game of planet beach ball? One person who saw it all coming was the irascible
American novelist Kurt Vonnegut: "Earth is such a pretty blue and pink and white
pearl in the pictures NASA sent me," he wrote in The New York Times Magazine in
1969. "It looks so clean. You can't see all the hungry, angry earthlings down

there — and the smoke and the sewage and trash and sophisticated weaponry."

Before those pictures, environmentalism had mostly been intensely local — an
earthy thing, not an Earth thing. It was Henry David Thoreau musing on the rows
of white bush beans in the soil by Walden Pond. It was Edward Abbey ranging
through the red rocks of southern Utah. It was Rachel Carson down in the dirt with
DDT-contaminated worms. It was vividly descriptive prose, naturalist sketches,
and, eventually, documentary photography and film seeking to awaken and inspire
love for specific creatures and places — and, by extension, for creatures and places
like them all over the world.

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When environmentalism went into outer space, adopting the perspective of the
omniscient outsider, things did start getting, as Vonnegut warned, awfully blurry.
Because if you are perpetually looking down at the earth from above, rather than
up from its roots and soil, it begins to make a certain kind of sense to shuffle around
pollution sources and pollution sinks as if they were pieces on a planet-sized
chessboard: a tropical forest to drink up the emissions from a European factory;
lower-carbon-fracked gas to replace coal; great fields of corn to displace
petroleum; and perhaps in the not too distant future, iron in the oceans and sulfur
dioxide in the stratosphere to counter carbon dioxide in the lower atmosphere.

And all the while, just as Vonnegut warned, any acknowledgment of the people
way down below the wispy clouds disappears — people with attachments to
particular pieces of land with very different ideas about what constitutes a
"solution." This chronic forgetfulness is the thread that unites so many fateful
policy errors of recent years, from the decision to embrace fracked natural gas as
a bridge fuel (failing to notice there were people on those lands who were willing
to fight against the shattering of their territory and the poisoning of their water) to
cap-and-trade and carbon offsets (forgetting the people once again, the ones forced
to breathe the toxic air next to refineries that were being kept open thanks to these
backroom deals, as well as the ones locked out of their traditional forests that were
being converted into offsets).

We saw the same above-it-all perspective take its toll, tragically, when many of
these same players persuaded themselves that biofuels were the perfect low-carbon
alternative to oil and gas — only to discover what would have been blindingly
obvious if people had figured as prominently in their calculations as carbon: that
using prime land to grow fuel puts the squeeze on food, and widespread hunger is
the entirely predictable result. And we see the same problems when policymakers
ram through industrial- scale wind farms and sprawling desert solar arrays without
local participation or consent, only to discover that people are living on those lands
with their own inconvenient opinions about how they should be used and who
should benefit from their development.

This lethal amensia is once again rearing its head in geoengineering discussions
like the one at Chicheley Hall. It is awfully reassuring to imagine that a
technological intervention could save Arctic ice from melting but, once again, far
too little attention is being paid to the billions of people living in monsoon-fed
parts of Asia and Africa who could well pay the price with their suffering, even
their lives.

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In some cases, the effect of the astronaut's eye view proves particularly extreme.
Their minds hovering out in orbit, there are those who begin to imagine leaving
the planet for good — saying, "Goodbye Earth!" to quote Princeton physicist
Gerard O'Neill, who, in the mid-1970s, started calling for the creation of space
colonies to overcome the earth's resource limits. Interestingly, one of O'Neill's
most devoted disciples was Stewart Brand, the founder of the Whole Earth
Catalog, who spent a good chunk of the 1970s arguing that the U.S. government
should build space colonies; today he is one of the most vocal proponents of Big

Tech fixes to climate change, whether nuclear power or geoengineering.

And he's not the only prominent geoengineering booster nurturing the ultimate
escape fantasy. Lowell Wood, co-inventor of the hose-to-the-sky, is an evangelical
proponent of terraforming Mars: there is "a 50/50 chance that young children now
alive will walk on Martian meadows . . . will swim in Martian lakes," he told an
Aspen audience in 2007, describing the technological expertise for making this
happen as "kid's stuff."

And then there is Richard Branson, Mr. Retail Space himself. In September
2012, Branson told CBS This Morning that, "In my lifetime, I am determined to be
part of starting a population on Mars. I think it is absolutely realistic. It will
happen." This plan, he said, includes "people inhabiting Mars ... in sort of giant
domes." In another interview, he revealed that he has put a striking amount of
thought into who should be invited to this outer space cocktail party: "You're going
to want physicians, you're going to want comedians, you're going to want fun
people, beautiful people, ugly people, a good cross-section of what happens on
Earth on Mars. People have got to be able to get on together, because it's going to
be quite confined." Oh and one more person on the list: "It may be a one-way
trip.... So maybe I'll wait till the last 10 years of my life, and then maybe go, if
my wife will let me," Branson said. In explaining his rationale, the Virgin head has
invoked physicist Stephen Hawking, who "thinks it's absolutely essential for
mankind to colonize other planets because one day, something dreadful might
happen to the Earth. And it would be very sad to see years of evolution going to

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waste.

So said the man whose airlines have a carbon footprint the size of Honduras'
and who is pinning his hopes for planetary salvation not on emissions cuts, but on

a carbon-sucking machine that hasn't been invented yet. Perhaps this is mere
coincidence, but it does seem noteworthy that so many key figures in the
geoengineering scene share a strong interest in a planetary exodus. For it is surely

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a lot easier to accept the prospect of a recklessly high-risk Plan B when you have,
in your other back pocket, a Plan C.

The danger is not so much that these visions will be realized; geoengineering the
earth is a long shot, never mind terraforming Mars. Yet as Branson's own
emissions illustrate so elegantly, these fantasies are already doing real damage in
the here and now. As environmental author Kenneth Brower writes, "The notion
that science will save us is the chimera that allows the present generation to
consume all the resources it wants, as if no generations will follow. It is the
sedative that allows civilization to march so steadfastly toward environmental
catastrophe. It forestalls the real solution, which will be in the hard, nontechnical
work of changing human behavior." And worst of all, it tells us that, "should the
fix fail, we have someplace else to go."

We know this escape story all too well, from Noah's Ark to the Rapture. What
we need are stories that tell us something very different: that this planet is our only
home, and that what goes around comes around (and what goes up, stays up for a
very long time, so we'd better be careful what we put there).

Indeed, if geoengineering has anything going for it, it is that it slots perfectly
into our most hackneyed cultural narrative, the one in which so many of us have
been indoctrinated by organized religion and the rest of us have absorbed from
pretty much every Hollywood action movie ever made. It's the one that tells us
that, at the very last minute, some of us (the ones that matter) are going to be saved.
And since our secular religion is technology, it won't be god that saves us but Bill
Gates and his gang of super-geniuses at Intellectual Ventures. We hear versions of
this narrative every time a commercial comes on about how coal is on the verge of
becoming "clean," about how the carbon produced by the tar sands will soon be
sucked out of the air and buried deep underground, and now, about how the mighty
sun will be turned down as if it were nothing more than a chandelier on a dimmer.
And if one of the current batch of schemes doesn't work, the same story tells us
that something else will surely arrive in the nick of time. We are, after all, the
super-species, the chosen ones, the God Species. We will triumph in the end
because triumphing is what we do.

But after so many of our most complex systems have failed, from BP's
deepwater drilling to the derivatives market — with some of our biggest brains
failing to foresee these outcomes — there is some evidence that the power of this
particular narrative arc is beginning to weaken. The Brookings Institution released
a survey in 2012 that found that roughly seven in ten Americans think that trying
to turn down the sun will do more harm than good. Only three in ten believe that

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"scientists would be able to find ways to alter the climate in a way that limits
problems" caused by warming. And in a paper published in Nature Climate
Change in early 2014, researchers analyzed data from interviews and a large online
survey conducted in Australia and New Zealand — with the biggest sample size of
any geoengineering public opinion study to date. Malcolm Wright, the study's lead
author, explained, "The results show that the public has strong negative views
towards climate engineering.... It is a striking result and a very clear pattern.
Interventions such as putting mirrors in space or fine particles into the stratosphere
are not well received." Perhaps most interesting of all given the high-tech subject,

older respondents were more amenable to geoengineering than younger ones.

And the best news is that the time of astronaut's eye- view environmentalism
appears to be passing, with a new movement rising to take its place, one deeply
rooted in specific geographies but networked globally as never before. Having
witnessed the recent spate of big failures, this generation of activists is unwilling
to gamble with the precious and irreplaceable, certainly not based on the reassuring
words of overconfident engineers.

This is a movement of many movements, and though utterly undetectable from
space, it is beginning to shake the fossil fuel industry to its core.

~ The retreat took place under the Chatham House Rule, which allows those attending to report on what
was said in sessions, but not on who said what. (Any interviews conducted outside of the official sessions
are exempt from these rules.)

~ It's particularly troubling that within the small group of scientists, engineers, and inventors who dominate
the geoengineering debate, there have been a disproportionate share of big public errors in the past. Take,
for instance, Lowell Wood, co-creator of Myhrvold's StratoShield. Before becoming a prominent
proponent of the "Pinatubo Option," Wood was best known for coming up with some of the more fantastical
elements of Ronald Reagan's "Star Wars" missile defense program, widely discredited as expensive and
reckless.

~ That said, we would be wise to anticipate even small amounts of geoengineering unleashing a new age of
weather-related geopolitical recrimination, paranoia, and possibly retaliation, with every future natural
disaster being blamed — rightly or wrongly — on the people in faraway labs playing god.

~ Ironically, the most reproduced of the earth-from-space photos was likely taken by Harrison Schmitt, a
card-carrying climate change denier, former U.S. senator and a regular speaker at Heartland conferences.
He was rather blase about the experience: "You seen one Earth, you've seen them all," he reportedly said.

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PART THREE

STARTING ANYWAY

"The day capitalism is forced to tolerate non-capitalist societies in its
midst and to acknowledge limits in its quest for domination, the day it is
forced to recognize that its supply of raw material will not be endless, is
the day when change will come. If there is any hope for the world at all,
it does not live in climate-change conference rooms or in cities with tall
buildings. It lives low down on the ground, with its arms around the
people who go to battle every day to protect their forests, their mountains
and their rivers because they know that the forests, the mountains and
the rivers protect them.

"The first step towards reimagining a world gone terribly wrong
would be to stop the annihilation of those who have a different
imagination — an imagination that is outside of capitalism as well as
communism. An imagination which has an altogether different
understanding of what constitutes happiness and fulfillment. To gain this
philosophical space, it is necessary to concede some physical space for the
survival of those who may look like the keepers of our past, but who may
really be the guides to our future."

-Arundhati Roy, 20 10 1

"When I started the lawsuit against Chevron in 1993, 1 thought, 'What
we need to do to fight this company and to get justice is we need to unite
the Amazon.' And that was a hard challenge. That was a hard task
ahead. And now, today, I dare to say that we must unite the entire world.
We have to unite the entire world to fight these companies, to fight these
challenges."

-Luis Yanza, cofounder, Frente de Defensa de la Amazonia (Amazon

Defense Front), 2010 2

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BLOCKADIA

The New Climate Warriors

"Where there are threats of serious or irreversible damage, lack of full
scientific certainty shall not be used as a reason for postponing cost-
effective measures to prevent environmental degradation."

-The United Nations Rio Declaration on Environment and Development,

1992 1

"An honest and scrupulous man in the oil business is so rare as to rank
as a museum piece."

-U.S. Interior Secretary Harold Ickes, 1936

"Passport," says the cop, tear gas canisters and grenades hanging off his
bulletproof vest like medals of honor. We hand over the passports, along with press
passes and other papers attesting that we are nothing more exciting than a vanload
of Canadian documentary filmmakers.

The riot cop takes the documents wordlessly, motioning to our translator to get
out of the car. He then whispers at length to a colleague whose eyes remain fixed
on the enormous biceps bulging from his own crossed arms. Another cop joins the
huddle, then another. The last one pulls out a phone and painstakingly reads the
names and numbers on each document to whoever is on the other end, occasionally
shooting a question to our translator. More uniformed men mill nearby. I count
eleven in total. It's getting dark, the dirt road on which we have been apprehended
is a mess and drops off sharply on one side. There are no streetlights.

I have the strong impression we are being deliberately screwed with — that the
whole point of this lengthy document check is to force us to drive this rough road
in the dark. But we all know the rules: look pleasant; don't make eye contact; don't

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speak unless spoken to. Resist the impulse to take pictures of the line of heavily
armed cops standing in front of coils of barbed wire (happily it turns out our camera
guy was filming through his mesh hat). And Rule No. 1 on encounters with
arbitrary power: do not show how incredibly pissed off you are.

We wait. Half an hour. Forty minutes. Longer. The sun sets. Our van fills with
ravenous mosquitoes. We continue to smile pleasantly.

As far as checkpoints go, I've seen worse. In post-invasion Iraq, everyone had
to submit to full pat-downs in order to get in and out of any vaguely official
building. Once on the way in and out of Gaza, we were scanned eight different
ways and interrogated at length by both the Israeli Defense Forces and Hamas.
What's strange about what is happening on this dirt road is that we are not in a war
zone, at least not officially. Nor is this a military regime, or an occupied territory,
or any other place you might expect to be held and interrogated at length without
cause. This is a public road in Greece, a democratic state belonging to the European
Union. Moreover this particular road is in Halkidiki, a world-renowned tourist
destination that attracts many thousands of visitors every year, drawn to the
peninsula's stunning combination of sandy beaches, turquoise waters, olive
groves, and old-growth forests filled with four-hundred-year-old beech and oak
trees and dotted with waterfalls.

So what's up with all the riot police? The barbed wire? The surveillance cameras
strapped to tree branches?

Welcome to Blockadia

What' s up is that this area is no longer a Greek vacationland, though the tourists
still crowd the white-washed resorts and oceanfront tavernas, with their blue-
checked tablecloths and floors sticky with ouzo. This is an outpost of a territory
some have taken to calling "Blockadia." Blockadia is not a specific location on a
map but rather a roving transnational conflict zone that is cropping up with
increasing frequency and intensity wherever extractive projects are attempting to
dig and drill, whether for open-pit mines, or gas fracking, or tar sands oil pipelines.

What unites these increasingly interconnected pockets of resistance is the sheer
ambition of the mining and fossil fuel companies: the fact that in their quest for
high-priced commodities and higher-risk "unconventional" fuels, they are pushing
relentlessly into countless new territories, regardless of the impact on the local
ecology (in particular, local water systems), as well as the fact that many of the

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industrial activities in question have neither been adequately tested nor regulated,
yet have already shown themselves to be extraordinarily accident-prone.

What unites Blockadia too is the fact the people at the forefront — packing local
council meetings, marching in capital cities, being hauled off in police vans, even
putting their bodies between the earth-movers and earth — do not look much like
your typical activist, nor do the people in one Blockadia site resemble those in
another. Rather, they each look like the places where they live, and they look like
everyone: the local shop owners, the university professors, the high school
students, the grandmothers. (In the quaint seaside Greek village of Ierissos, with
its red roofs and lively beach promenade, when an anti-mining rally is called, the
owners of the tavernas have to wait tables themselves because their entire staffs
are off at the demos.)

Resistance to high-risk extreme extraction is building a global, grassroots, and
broad-based network the likes of which the environmental movement has rarely
seen. And perhaps this phenomenon shouldn't even be referred to as an
environmental movement at all, since it is primarily driven by a desire for a deeper
form of democracy, one that provides communities with real control over those
resources that are most critical to collective survival — the health of the water, air,
and soil. In the process, these place-based stands are stopping real climate crimes
in progress.

Seeing those successes, as well as the failures of top-down environmentalism,
many young people concerned about climate change are taking a pass on the slick
green groups and the big U.N. summits. Instead, they are flocking to the barricades
of Blockadia. This is more than a change in strategy; it's a fundamental change in
perspective. The collective response to the climate crisis is changing from
something that primarily takes place in closed-door policy and lobbying meetings
into something alive and unpredictable and very much in the streets (and
mountains, and farmers' fields, and forests).

Unlike so many of their predecessors, who've spent years imagining the climate
crisis through the astronaut's eye view, these activists have dropped the model
globes and are getting lower-case earth under their nails once again. As Scott
Parkin, a climate organizer with the Rainforest Action Network, puts it: "People
are hungry for climate action that does more than asks you to send emails to your
climate-denying congressperson or update your Facebook status with some clever
message about fossil fuels. Now, a new antiestablishment movement has broken
with Washington's embedded elites and has energized a new generation to stand

in front of the bulldozers and coal trucks." And it has taken the extractive

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industries, so accustomed to calling the shots, entirely by surprise: suddenly, no
major new project, no matter how seemingly routine, is a done deal.

In the Skouries forest near Ierissos where our van was stopped, the catalyst was
a plan by the Canadian mining company Eldorado Gold to clear-cut a large swath
of old-growth forest and reengineer the local water system in order to build a
massive open-pit gold and copper mine, along with a processing plant, and a large

underground mine. We were pulled over in a part of the forest that will be leveled
to make way for a large dam and tailings pond, to be filled with liquid waste from
the mining operation. It was like visiting someone who had just been given six
months to live.

Many of the people who reside in the villages nearby, who depend on this
mountain for freshwater, are adamantly opposed to the mine. They fear for the
health of their children and livestock, and are convinced that such a large-scale,
toxic industrial operation has no place in a region highly dependent on tourism,
fishing, and farming. Locals have expressed their opposition through every means
they can think of. In a vacation community like this, that can make for odd
juxtapositions: militant marches past miniature amusement parks and heated late
night political meetings in thatched-roof bars that specialize in blender drinks. Or
a local cheese maker, the pride of the village for his Guinness Book of World
Records largest ever goat cheese, arrested and held in pretrial detention for weeks.
Based on circumstantial evidence, the cheese maker and other villagers were
suspects in an incident in which mining trucks and bulldozers were torched by
masked intruders.

Despite its remote location, the fate of the Skouries forest is a matter of intense
preoccupation for the entire country. It is debated in the national parliament and
on evening talk shows. For Greece's huge progressive movement, it is something
of a cause celebre: urban activists in Thessaloniki and Athens organize mass
demonstrations and travel to the woods for action days and fundraising concerts.
"Save Skouries" graffiti can be seen all over the country and the official opposition
party, the left-wing Syriza, has pledged that, if elected, it will cancel the mine as
one of its first acts in power.

The governing, austerity-enforcing coalition, on the other hand, has also seized
on Skouries as a symbol. Greek prime minister Antonis Samaras has announced
that the Eldorado mine will go ahead "at all costs," such is the importance of
protecting "foreign investment in the country." Invoking Greece's ongoing
economic troubles, his coalition has claimed that building the mine, despite the
local opposition, is critical to sending a signal to world markets that the country is

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open for business. That will allow the nation to rapidly move ahead with a slate of
other, highly controversial extractive projects currently in the pipeline: drilling for
oil and gas in the Aegean and Ionian seas; new coal plants in the north; opening
up previously protected beaches to large-scale development; and multiple other
mining projects. As one prominent commentator put it, "This is the type of project
that the country needs to overcome the economic crisis. "~

Because of these national stakes, the state has unleashed a level of repression
against the anti-mine movement that is unprecedented in Greece since the dark
days of dictatorship. The forest has been transformed into a battle zone, with rubber
bullets reportedly fired and tear gas so thick it caused older residents to

collapse. And of course the checkpoints, which are staggered along all the roads
where heavy construction equipment has moved in.

But in this outpost of Blockadia, the police aren't the only ones
with checkpoints: In Ierissos, local residents set up checkpoints at each entrance to
their village after over two hundred fully armed riot police marched through the
town's narrow streets firing tear gas canisters in all directions; one exploded in the

schoolyard, causing children to choke in class. To make sure they are never taken
by surprise like this again, the checkpoints are staffed by volunteers around the
clock, and when police vehicles are spotted someone runs to the church and rings
the bell. In moments the streets are flooded with chanting villagers.

Similar scenes, more reminiscent of civil war than political protest, are unfolding
in countless other pieces of contested land around the world, all of which make up
Blockadia' s multiplying front lines. About eight hundred kilometers to the north
of the Greek standoff, the farming village of Pungesti, Romania, was gearing up
for a showdown against Chevron and its plans to launch the country' s first shale

gas exploration well. In the fall of 2013, farmers built a protest camp in a field,
carted in supplies that could hold them for weeks, dug a latrine, and vowed to
prevent Chevron from drilling.

As in Greece, the response from the state was shockingly militarized, especially
in such a pastoral environment. An army of riot police with shields and batons
charged through the farm fields attacking peaceful demonstrators, several of whom
were beaten bloody and taken away in ambulances. At one point angry villagers
dismantled the fence protecting Chevron's operation, sparking more reprisals. In
the village itself, riot police lined the streets like "a kind of occupying army,"
according to an eyewitness. Meanwhile, the roads into town were bisected with

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police checkpoints and a travel ban was in force, which conveniently prevented
media from entering the conflict zone and even reportedly blocked residents from
grazing their cattle. For their part, villagers explained that they had no choice but
to stop an extraction activity that they were convinced posed a grave threat to their
livelihoods. "We live on agriculture here," one local reasoned. "We need clear
water. What will our cattle drink if the water gets spoiled?"

Blockadia also stretches into multiple resource hot spots in Canada, my home
country. For instance, in October 2013 — the same time that Pungesti was in the
news — a remarkably similar standoff was playing out in the province of New
Brunswick, on land claimed by the Elsipogtog First Nation, a Mi'kmaq community
whose roots in what is now eastern Canada go back some ten thousand years. The
people of Elsipogtog were leading a blockade against SWN Resources, the
Canadian subsidiary of a Texas-based company, as it tried to conduct seismic
testing ahead of a possible tracking operation. The land in question has not been
handed over by war or treaty and Canada' s highest court has upheld the Mi'kmaq' s
right to continue to access the natural resources of those lands and waters — rights
the protesters say would be rendered meaningless if the territory becomes poisoned
by tracking toxins.

The previous June, members of the First Nation had announced the lighting of a
"sacred fire," a ceremonial bonfire that would burn continuously for days, and
invited non-Native Canadians to join them in blockading the gas company' s trucks.
Many did, and for months demonstrators camped near the seismic testing area,
blocking roads and equipment as hand drums pounded out traditional songs. On
several occasions, trucks were prevented from working, and at one point a
Mi'kmaq woman strapped herself to a pile of seismic testing gear to prevent it
from being moved.

The conflict had been mostly peaceful but then on October 17, acting on an
injunction filed by the company, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police moved in to
clear the road. Once again, a rural landscape was turned into a war zone: more than
a hundred police officers — some armed with sniper rifles and accompanied by
attack dogs — fired beanbag rounds into the crowd, along with streams of pepper
spray and hoses. Elders and children were attacked and dozens were arrested,
including the elected chief of the Elsipogtog First Nation. Some demonstrators
responded by attacking police vehicles and by the end of the day, five cop cars and
one unmarked van had burned. "Native shale-gas protest erupts in violence," read
a typical headline.

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Blockadia has popped up, too, in multiple spots in the British countryside, where
opponents of the U.K. government's "dash for gas" have used a range of creative
tactics to disrupt industry activities, from protest picnics blockading the road to a
fracking drill site in the tiny hamlet of Balcombe, West Sussex, to twenty-one
activists shutting down a gas power station that towers over the abandoned
historical village of West Burton and its beautiful river, the "silver" Trent, as
Shakespeare describes it in Henry IV. After a daring climb, the group set up camp
for more than a week atop two ninety- meter- high water cooling towers, making
production impossible (the company was forced to drop a £5-million lawsuit in the
face of public pressure). More recently, activists blocked the entrance to a fracking
test site near the city of Manchester with a giant wind turbine blade laid on its
side.

Blockadia was also aboard the Arctic Sunrise, when thirty Greenpeace activists
staged a protest in the Russian Arctic to draw attention to the dangers of the rush
to drill under the melting ice. Armed Coast Guard officers rappelled onto the vessel
from a helicopter, storming it commando- style, and the activists were thrown in

jail for two months. Originally facing charges of piracy, which carry sentences
of ten to fifteen years, the international activists were all eventually freed and
granted amnesty after the Russian government was shamed by a huge international
campaign, which included not just demonstrations in at least forty-nine countries
but pressure from numerous heads of state and eleven Nobel Peace Prize winners
(not to mention Paul McCartney).

The spirit of Blockadia can be seen even in the most repressive parts of China,
where herders in Inner Mongolia have rebelled against plans to turn their fossil
fuel-rich region into the country's "energy base." "When it's windy, we get
covered in coal dust because it's an open mine. And the water level keeps dropping
every year," herder Wang Wenlin told the Los Angeles Times, adding, "There's
really no point living here anymore." With courageous actions that have left
several demonstrators dead outside the mines and blockades of coal trucks, locals
have staged rolling protests around the region and have been met with ferocious

state repression.

It's partly due to this kind of internal opposition to coal mining that China
imports increasing amounts of coal from abroad. But many of the places where its
coal comes from are in the throes of Blockadia- style uprisings of their own. For
instance, in New South Wales, Australia, opposition to new coal mining operations
grows more serious and sustained by the month. Beginning in August 2012, a
coalition of groups established what they call the "first blockade camp of a coal

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mine in Australia's history," where for a year and a half (and counting) activists
have chained themselves to various entrances of the Maules Creek project — the
largest mine under construction in the country, which along with others in the area
is set to decimate up to half of the 7,500-hectare (18,500 acre) Leard State Forest
and to wield a greenhouse gas footprint representing more than 5 percent of
Australia's annual emissions, according to one estimate.^

Much of that coal is destined for export to Asia, however, so activists are also
gearing up to fight port expansions in Queensland that would hugely increase the
number of coal ships sailing from Australia each year, including through the
vulnerable ecosystem of the Great Barrier Reef, a World Heritage Site and the
earth's largest natural structure made up of living creatures. The Australian Marine
Conservation Society describes the dredging of the ocean floor to make way for
increased coal traffic as an "unprecedented" threat to the fragile reef, which is
already under severe stress from ocean acidification and various forms of pollution
runoff.

This is only the barest of sketches of the contours of Blockadia — but no picture
would be complete without the astonishing rise of resistance against virtually any
piece of infrastructure connected to the Alberta tar sands, whether inside Canada
or in the United States.

And none more so than TransCanada' s proposed Keystone XL pipeline. Part of
the broader Keystone Pipeline System crisscrossing the continent, the first phase
of the project, known as Keystone 1, got off to an inauspicious start. In its first
year or so of operation, pump stations along the pipeline spilled tar sands oil
fourteen times in the U.S. Most spills were small, but two of the biggest forced the
entire pipeline to shut down twice in a single month. In one of these cases, a North
Dakota rancher woke up to the sight of an oil geyser surging above the cottonwood
trees near his farm, remarking that it was "just like in the movies when you strike
oil and it's shooting up." If Keystone XL is constructed in full (the southern leg,
from Oklahoma to export terminals on the Texas coast, is already up and running),
the $7 billion project will add a total of 2,677 kilometers of new pipeline running
through seven states and provinces, delivering up to 830,000 barrels per day of

mostly tar sands oil to Gulf Coast refineries and export terminals.

It was Keystone that provoked that historic wave of civil disobedience in
Washington, D.C., in 201 1 (see page 139), followed by what were then the largest
protests in the history of the U.S. climate movement (more than 40,000 people
outside the White House in February 2013). And it is Keystone that brought
together the unexpected alliance of Indigenous tribes and ranchers along the

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pipeline route that became known as "the Cowboy and Indian alliance" (not to
mention unlikely coalitions that brought together vegan activists who think meat
is murder with cattle farmers whose homes are decorated with deer heads). In fact
the direct-action group Tar Sands Blockade first coined the term "Blockadia" in
August 2012, while planning what turned into an eighty-six-day tree blockade
challenging Keystone's construction in East Texas. This coalition has used every
imaginable method to stop the pipeline's southern leg, from locking themselves
inside a length of pipe that had not yet been laid, to creating a complex network of

treehouses and other structures along the route.

In Canada, it was the Northern Gateway pipeline, being pushed by the energy
company Enbridge, that similarly awoke the sleeping giant of latent ecological
outrage. The 1,177-kilometer pipe would begin near Edmonton, Alberta, and carry
525,000 barrels of mostly diluted tar sands oil per day across roughly one thousand
waterways, passing through some of the most pristine temperate rainforest in the
world (and highly avalanche -prone mountains), finally ending in a new export
terminal in the northern British Columbia town of Kitimat. There the oil would be
loaded onto supertankers and then navigated through narrow Pacific channels that
are often battered by ferocious waves (resorts in this part of B.C. market winter as
"storm-watching" season). The sheer audacity of the proposal — putting so much
of Canada's most beloved wilderness, fishing grounds, beaches, and marine life at
risk — helped give birth to an unprecedented coalition of Canadians who oppose
the project, including a historic alliance of Indigenous groups in British Columbia
who have vowed to act as "an unbroken wall of opposition from the U.S. border
to the Arctic Ocean," to stop any new pipeline that would carry tar sands oil
through their collective territory.^

The companies at the centers of these battles are still trying to figure out what
hit them. TransCanada, for instance, was so sure it would be able to push through
the Keystone XL pipeline without a hitch that it went ahead and bought over $1
billion worth of pipe. And why not? President Obama has an "all of the above"
energy strategy, and Canadian prime minister Stephen Harper called the project a
"no-brainer." But instead of the rubberstamp TransCanada was expecting, the
project sparked a movement so large it revived (and reinvented) U.S.
environmentalism.~

Spend enough time in Blockadia and you start to notice patterns. The slogans on
the signs: "Water is life," "You can't eat money," "Draw the line." A shared
determination to stay in the fight for the long haul, and to do whatever it takes to
win. Another recurring element is the prominent role played by women, who often

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dominate the front lines, providing not only powerful moral leadership but also
some of these movements' most enduring iconography. In New Brunswick, for
instance, the image of a lone Mi'kmaq mother, kneeling in the middle of the
highway before a line of riot police, holding up a single eagle feather went viral.
In Greece, the gesture that captured hearts and minds was when a seventy-four-
year-old woman confronted a line of riot police by belting out a revolutionary song
that had been sung by the Greek resistance against German occupation. From
Romania, the image of an old woman wearing a babushka and holding a knobby
walking stick went around the world under the caption: "You know your

government has failed when your grandma starts to riot."

The various toxic threats these communities are up against seem to be
awakening impulses that are universal, even primal — whether it's the fierce drive
to protect children from harm, or a deep connection to land that had been
previously suppressed. And though reported in the mainstream press as isolated
protests against specific projects, these sites of resistance increasingly see
themselves as part of a global movement, one opposing the latest commodities
rush wherever it is taking place. Social media in particular has allowed
geographically isolated communities to tell their stories to the world, and for those
stories, in turn, to become part of a transnational narrative about resistance to a
common ecological crisis.

So busloads of anti-fracking and anti-mountaintop-removal activists traveled to
Washington, D.C., to protest the Keystone XL pipeline, knowing they are up
against a common enemy: the push into ever more extreme and high-risk forms of
fossil fuel. Communities in France, upon discovering that their land has been
leased to a gas company for something called "hydraulic fracturing" — a previously
unknown practice in Europe — got in contact with French-speaking activists in
Quebec, who had successfully won a moratorium against the practice (and they, in
turn, relied heavily on U.S. activists, in particular the documentary film Gasland,

*23

which has proved to be a potent global organizing tool).^~ And eventually the
entire global movement came together for a "Global Frackdown" in September
2012, with actions in two hundred communities in more than twenty countries,
with even more participating a year later.

Something else unites this network of local resistance: widespread awareness of
the climate crisis, and the understanding that these new extraction projects — which
produce far more carbon dioxide, in the case of the tar sands, and more methane,
in the case of tracking, than their conventional counterparts — are taking the entire
planet in precisely the wrong direction. These activists understand that keeping

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carbon in the ground, and protecting ancient, carbon-sequestering forests from
being clear-cut for mines, is a prerequisite for preventing catastrophic warming.
So while these conflicts are invariably sparked by local livelihood and safety
concerns, the global stakes are never far from the surface.

Ecuadorian biologist Esperanza Martinez, one of the leaders of the movement
for an "oil-free Amazon," asks the question at the heart of all of these campaigns:
"Why should we sacrifice new areas if fossil fuels should not be extracted in the
first place?" Indeed, if the movement has a guiding theory, it is that it is high time
to close, rather than expand, the fossil fuel frontier. Seattle -based environmental
policy expert KC Golden has called this "the Keystone Principle." He explains,
"Keystone isn't simply a pipeline in the sand for the swelling national climate
movement." It's an expression of the core principle that before we can effectively
solve this crisis, we have to "stop making it worse. Specifically and categorically,
we must cease making large, long-term capital investments in new fossil fuel
infrastructure that 'locks in' dangerous emission levels for many decades . . . step

one for getting out of a hole: Stop digging."

So if Obama's energy policy is "all of the above" — which effectively means full
steam ahead with fossil fuel extraction, complemented with renewables around the
margins — Blockadia is responding with a tough philosophy that might be
described as "None of the below." It is based on the simple principle that it's time
to stop digging up poisons from the deep and shift, with all speed, to powering our
lives from the abundant energies on our planet's surface.

Operation Climate Change

While the scale and connectivity of this kind of anti-extraction activism is certainly
new, the movement began long before the fight against Keystone XL. If it's
possible to trace this wave back to a time and place, it should probably be the 1990s
in what is surely the most oil-ravaged place on the planet: the Niger Delta.

Since the doors to foreign investors were flung open near the end of British
colonial rule, oil companies have pumped hundreds of billions of dollars' worth of
crude out of Nigeria, most from the Niger Delta, while consistently treating its
land, water, and people with undisguised disdain. Wastewater was dumped directly
into rivers, streams, and the sea; canals from the ocean were dug willy-nilly,
turning precious freshwater sources salty, and pipelines were left exposed and
unmaintained, contributing to thousands of spills. In an often cited statistic,

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an Exxon Valdez-worth of oil has spilled in the Delta every year for about fifty

years, poisoning fish, animals, and humans.

But none of this compares with the misery that is gas flaring. Over the course of
extracting oil, a large amount of natural gas is also produced. If the infrastructure
for capturing, transporting, and using that gas were built in Nigeria, it could meet
the electricity needs of the entire country. Yet in the Delta, the multinational
companies mostly opt to save money by setting it on fire, or flaring it, which sends
the gas into the atmosphere in great pillars of polluting fire. The practice is
responsible for about 40 percent of Nigeria's total CO2 emissions (which is why,
as discussed, some companies are absurdly trying to collect carbon credits for
stopping this practice). Meanwhile, more than half of Delta communities lack
electricity and runningwater, unemployment is rampant, and, in a cruel irony, the

region is plagued by fuel shortages.^

Since the 1970s, Nigerians living in the Delta have been demanding redress for
the damage done to them by multinational oil giants. The fight entered a new phase
at the start of the 1990s when the Ogoni — a relatively small Indigenous group in
the Niger Delta — organized the Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People
(MOSOP), led by the famed human rights activist and playwright Ken Saro-Wiwa.
The group took particular aim at Shell, which had extracted $5.2 billion from

Ogoniland between 1958 and 1993.

The new organization did more than beg the government for better conditions,
it asserted the rights of the Ogoni people to control the resources under their lands
and set about taking those rights back. Not only were oil installations shut down,
but as Nigerian political ecologist and environmental activist Godwin Uyi Ojo
writes that, on January 4, 1993, "an estimated 300,000 Ogoni, including women
and children, staged a historic non- violent protest, and marched against Shell's
'ecological wars.' "That year, Shell was forced to pull out of Ogoni territory,
forsaking significant revenues (though the company remains the biggest oil player
in other parts of the Delta). Saro-Wiwa stated that the Nigerian state "will have to

shoot and kill every Ogoni man, woman and child to take more of their oil."

To this day, oil production has ceased in Ogoniland — a fact that remains one of
the most significant achievements of grassroots environmental activism anywhere
in the world. Because of Ogoni resistance, carbon has stayed in the ground and out
of the atmosphere. In the two decades since Shell withdrew, the land has slowly
begun to heal, and there are tentative reports of improved farming output. This
represents, according to Ojo, "on a global scale, the most formidable community-

wide resistance to corporate oil operations."

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But Shell's banishment was not the end of the story. From the start of the
protests, the Nigerian government — which relies on oil for 80 percent of its
revenues and 95 percent of its export earnings — saw the organized Ogoni as a
grave threat. As the region mobilized to take its land back from Shell, thousands
of Delta residents were tortured and killed and dozens of Ogoni villages were
razed. In 1995, the military regime of General Sani Abacha tried Ken Saro-Wiwa
and eight of his compatriots on trumped-up charges. And then all nine men were
hanged, fulfilling Saro-Wiwa' s prediction that "they are going to arrest us all and

execute us. All for Shell."

It was a wrenching blow to the movement, but residents of the Niger Delta
fought on. By employing increasingly militant tactics like taking over offshore oil
platforms, oil barges, and flow stations, this community-led resistance managed to

shut down roughly twenty oil installations, significantly reducing production.

A key and little examined chapter in the Niger Delta's fossil fuel resistance took
place at the tail end of 1998. Five thousand young people belonging to the Ijaw
Nation, one of the largest ethnic groups in Nigeria, held a gathering in Kaiama, a
town in a southern province of the Delta. There, the Ijaw Youth Council drafted
the Kaiama Declaration, which asserted that 70 pecent of the government's oil
revenues came from Ijaw land and that, "Despite these huge contributions, our
reward from the Nigerian State remains avoidable deaths resulting from ecological
devastation and military repression." The declaration — endorsed by a huge cross-
section of Delta society — stated: "All land and natural resources (including
mineral resources) within the Ijaw territory belong to Ijaw communities and are
the basis of our survival," and went on to demand "Self Government and resource

control."

But it was Clause 4 that commanded the most attention: "We, therefore, demand
that all oil companies stop all exploration and exploitation activities in the Ijaw
area. . . . Hence, we advise all oil companies staff and contractors to withdraw from
Ijaw territories by the 30th December, 1998 pending the resolution of the issue of

resource ownership and control in the Ijaw area of the Niger Delta."

The Ijaw Youth Council voted unanimously to call their new offensive
Operation Climate Change. "The idea was: we are going to change our world,"
Isaac Osuoka, one of the movement's organizers, told me. "There was an
understanding of the link that the same crude oil that impoverishes us, also
impoverishes the Earth. And that a movement to change the wider world can begin
from changing our own world." This was, in other words, an attempt at another
kind of climate change — an effort by a group of people whose lands had been

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poisoned and whose future was imperiled to change their political climate, their

security climate, their economic climate, and even their spiritual climate.

As promised, on December 30 the youth took to the streets in the thousands. The
leadership instructed participants not to carry weapons and not to drink. The
demonstrations — calledO geles, which are traditional Ijaw processions — were
nonviolent and dramatic. Many participants wore black, held candles, sang,
danced, and drummed. Several oil platforms were occupied, not with arms but
through the sheer numbers of bodies that overwhelmed security guards.
"Sometimes," Osuoka recalled in a phone interview, "a person will have worked
for a short time for the oil companies, so they knew which valve was the one to
turn off."

The Nigerian government's response was overwhelming. An estimated fifteen
thousand troops were mobilized, warships were sent, as were fleets of tanks. In
some regions the government declared a state of emergency and imposed a curfew.
According to Osouka, "In village after village, soldiers deployed by the state
opened fire on unarmed citizens." In the towns of "Kaiama, Mbiama, and Yenagoa
people were killed in the streets and women and young girls were raped in their

homes as the state unleashed mayhem, ostensibly to defend oil installations."

The confrontations continued for about a week. By the end, as many as 200 or
possibly more lives were reported lost, and dozens of houses had been burned to
the ground. In at least one case, the soldiers who conducted lethal raids flew into
the area on a helicopter taken from a Chevron operation. (The oil giant claimed it
had no choice but to allow the equipment to be used by the military, since it came
from a joint venture with the Nigerian government, though as Human Rights
Watch noted, "The company did not issue any public protest at the killings; nor
has it stated that it will take any steps to avoid similar incidents in the future.")^

Brutal events like these go a long way toward explaining why many young
people in the Niger Delta today have lost their faith in nonviolence. And why, by
2006, the area was in the throes of a full-blown armed insurgency, complete with
bombings of oil infrastructure and government targets, rampant pipeline
vandalism, ransom kidnapping of oil workers (designated as "enemy combatants"
by the militants), and, more recently, amnesty deals that offered cash for guns.
Godwin Uyi Ojo writes that, as the armed conflict wore on, "grievance was soon

mingled with greed and violent crimes." In the process, the original goals of the
movement — to stop the ecological plunder, and take back control over the region's
resource — became harder to decipher.

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And yet it is worth looking back to the 1990s when the aims were clear. Because
what is evident in the original struggles of the Ogoni and Ijaw is that the fight
against violent resource extraction and the fight for greater community control,
democracy, and sovereignty are two sides of the same coin. The Nigerian
experience also had a huge and largely uncredited influence on other resource-rich
regions in the Global South that found themselves facing off against multinational
oil giants.

The most important such exchange took place in 1995, immediately after the
killing of Ken Saro-Wiwa, when activists from Environmental Rights Action in
Nigeria formed an alliance with a similar organization in Ecuador, called Accion
Ecologica. At that time Accion Ecologica was neck deep in an environmental and
human health disaster that Texaco had left behind in a northeastern region of the
country, an incident that became known as the "Rainforest Chernobyl." (Chevron,
after acquiring Texaco, was later ordered to pay $9.5 billion in damages by the

Ecuadorian supreme court; the legal battles are still ongoing). These frontline
activists in two of the worst oil-impacted regions on the planet formed an
organization called Oilwatch International, which has been at the forefront of the
global movement to "leave the oil in the soil" and whose influence can be felt
throughout Blockadia.

As the experiences in Nigeria and Ecuador make clear, anti-extraction activism is
not a new phenomenon. Communities with strong ties to the land have always, and
will always, defend themselves against businesses that threaten their ways of life.
And fossil fuel resistance has a long history in the United States, most notably
against mountaintop removal coal mining in Appalachia. Moreover, direct action
against reckless resource extraction has been a part of the environmental
movement for a very long time and has succeeded in protecting some of the
planet's most biologically diverse lands and waters. Many of the specific tactics
being used by Blockadia activists today — tree-sits and equipment lockdowns in
particular — were developed by Earth First! in the 1980s, when the group fought
"wars in the woods" against clear-cut logging.

What has changed in recent years is largely a matter of scale, which is itself a
reflection of the dizzying ambitions of the extractive project at this point in history.
The rise of Blockadia is, in many ways, simply the flip side of the carbon boom.
Thanks to a combination of high commodity prices, new technologies, and
depleted conventional reserves, the industry is going further on every front. It is

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extracting more, pushing into more territory, and relying on more risky methods.
Each of these factors is fueling the backlash, so it's worth looking at each in turn.

All in the Sacrifice Zone

Though there are certainly new and amplified risks associated with our era of
extreme energy (tar sands, fracking for both oil and gas, deepwater drilling,
mountaintop removal coal mining), it's important to remember that these have
never been safe or low-risk industries. Running an economy on energy sources that
release poisons as an unavoidable part of their extraction and refining has always
required sacrifice zones — whole subsets of humanity categorized as less than fully
human, which made their poisoning in the name of progress somehow acceptable.

And for a very long time, sacrifice zones all shared a few elements in common.
They were poor places. Out-of-the-way places. Places where residents lacked
political power, usually having to do with some combination of race, language,
and class. And the people who lived in these condemned places knew they had
been written off. To quote Paula Swearengin, an activist from a coal mining family
near Beckley, West Virginia, a landscape ravaged by mountaintop -removal coal

mining: "We live in the land of the lost."

Through various feats of denialism and racism, it was possible for privileged
people in North America and Europe to mentally cordon off these unlucky places
as hinterlands, wastelands, nowheres — or unluckiest of all, as in the case of Nauru,
middle of nowheres. For those fortunate enough to find ourselves outside those
condemned borders, myself among them, it seemed as if our places — the ones
where we live and to which we escape for pleasure (the assumed somewheres, the
centers, or best of all, the centers of everywhere) — would not be sacrificed to keep
the fossil fuel machine going.

And up until quite recently, that has held up as the grand bargain of the carbon
age: the people reaping the bulk of the benefits of extractivism pretend not to see
the costs of that comfort so long as the sacrifice zones are kept safely out of view.

But in less than a decade of the extreme energy frenzy and the commodity boom,
the extractive industries have broken that unspoken bargain. In very short order,
the sacrifice zones have gotten a great deal larger, swallowing ever more territory
and putting many people who thought they were safe at risk. Not only that, but
several of the largest zones targeted for sacrifice are located in some of the
wealthiest and most powerful countries in the world. For instance, Daniel Yergin,

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energy industry consultant (and author of The Prize), euphorically described the
newfound capacity to extract oil from "tight rock" formations — usually shale — as
being akin to discovering whole new petrostates: "This is like adding another
Venezuela or Kuwait by 2020, except these tight oil fields are in the United
States." 40

And of course it's not just the communities next to these new oil fields that are
asked to sacrifice. So much oil is now being extracted in the U.S. (or "Saudi
America," as some market watchers call it) that the number of rail cars carrying
oil has increased by 4111 percent in just five years, from 9,500 cars in 2008 to an
estimated 400,000 in 2013. (Little wonder that significantly more oil spilled in
U.S. rail incidents in 2013 than spilled in the previous forty years combined — or
that trains engulfed in smoking fireballs have become increasingly frequent sights
on the nightly news.) In practice this means that hundreds if not thousands of towns
and cities suddenly find themselves in the paths of poorly maintained,
underregulated "oil bomb" trains — towns like Quebec's Lac-Megantic, where, in
July 2013, a train carrying seventy-two tank cars of fracked Bakken oil (more
flammable than the regular kind) exploded, killing forty- seven people and
flattening half of its picturesque downtown. (Former North Dakota governor
George Sinner said the oil trains posed a "ridiculous threat" shortly after one blew

up near his native town of Casselton.)

The Alberta tar sands, meanwhile, are growing so fast that the industry will soon
be producing more of its particular brand of high-carbon oil than current pipeline
capacity can handle — which is why it is so determined to push projects like
Keystone XL through the U.S. and Northern Gateway through British Columbia.
"If there was something that kept me up at night," said Alberta's (then) energy
minister Ron Liepert in June 201 1, "it would be the fear that before too long we're
going to be landlocked in bitumen. We're not going to be an energy superpower if

we can't get the oil out of Alberta."^ But building those pipelines, as we have
seen, impacts a huge number of communities: the ones living along thousands of
kilometers of proposed pipe, as well as those who live along vast stretches of
coastline that would see their waters crowded with oil tankers, courting disaster.

No place, it seems, is off limits, and no extractive activity has set its sights on
more new land than hydraulic fracturing for natural gas. To quote Chesapeake
Energy's then-CEO Aubrey McClendon, in 2010, "In the last few years we have
discovered the equivalent of two Saudi Arabias of oil in the form of natural gas in

the United States. Not one, but two." Which is why the industry is fighting to
frack wherever it can. The Marcellus Shale, for instance, spans parts of

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Pennsylvania, Ohio, New York, West Virginia, Virginia, and Maryland. And it is
just one of many such massive blankets of methane-rich rock.

The endgame, according to Republican politician Rick Santorum, is to "drill
everywhere" — and it shows. As The Guardian'?, Suzanne Goldenberg reports,
"Energy companies have fracked wells on church property, school grounds and in
gated developments. Last November, an oil company put a well on the campus of
the University of North Texas in nearby Denton, right next to the tennis courts and
across the road from the main sports stadium and a stand of giant wind turbines."
Fracking now covers so much territory that, according to a 2013 Wall Street
Journal investigation, "more than 15 million Americans live within a mile of a

well that has been drilled and fracked since 2000."

In Canada, the ambitions are just as aggressive. "As of mid-2012, the entire
underground subsoil of Montreal, Laval, and Longueuil (three of the main cities in
Quebec) had been claimed by gas and petrol companies," reports Kim Cornelissen,
a former politician turned anti-fracking campaigner in the province. (So far,
Quebec's residents have managed to fend off the gas companies with a
moratorium.) In Britain, the area under consideration for fracking adds up to about
half the entire island. And in July 2013, residents of the northeast of England were
enraged to hear their region described as "uninhabited and desolate" in the House
of Lords — and therefore eminently deserving of sacrifice. "Certainly in part of the
northeast where there's plenty of room for fracking, well away from anybody's
residence where we could conduct [it] without any kind of threat to the rural
environment," said Lord Howell, who had been an energy advisor to David
Cameron's government.

This is coming as a rude surprise to a great many historically privileged people
who suddenly find themselves feeling something of what so many frontline
communities have felt for a very long time: how is it possible that a big distant
company can come to my land and put me and my kids at risk — and never even
ask my permission? How can it be legal to put chemicals in the air right where they
know children are playing? How is it possible that the state, instead of protecting
me from this attack, is sending police to beat up people whose only crime is trying
to protect their families?

This unwelcome awakening has made the fossil fuel sector a whole lot of
enemies out of onetime friends. People like South Dakota cattle rancher John
Harter, who went to court to try to stop TransCanada from burying a portion of the
Keystone XL pipeline on his land. "I've never considered myself a bunny hugger,"
he told a reporter, "but I guess if that's what I've got to be called now, I'm OK

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with it." The industry has also alienated people like Christina Mills, who worked
as an auditor for oil companies in Oklahoma for much of her career. But when a
gas company started fracking in her middle-class North Texas subdivision, her
views of the sector changed. "They made it personal here, and that's when I had a
problem. . . . They came into the back of our neighbourhood, 300ft from the back

fence. That is so intrusive."

And fracking opponents could only laugh when, in February 2014, it emerged
that none other than Exxon CEO Rex Tillerson had quietly joined a lawsuit
opposing fracking -related activities near his $5 million Texas home, claiming it
would lower property values. "I would like to officially welcome Rex to the
'Society of Citizens Really Enraged When Encircled by Drilling' (SCREWED),"
wrote Jared Polis, a Democratic Congressman from Colorado, in a sardonic
statement. "This select group of everyday citizens has been fighting for years to
protect their property values, the health of their local communities, and the
environment. We are thrilled to have the CEO of a major international oil and gas

corporation join our quickly multiplying ranks."
In 1776, Tom Paine wrote in his rabble-rousing pamphletCoraraon Sense, "It is

the good fortune of many to live distant from the scene of sorrow." Well, the
distance is closing, and soon enough no one will be safe from the sorrow of
ecocide. In a way, the name of the company at the center of Greece's anti-mining
movement says it all: Eldorado — a reference to the legendary "lost city of gold"
that drove the conquistadors to some of their bloodiest massacres in the Americas.
This kind of pillage used to be reserved for non-European countries, with the loot
returned to the motherland in Europe. But as Eldorado's activities in northern
Greece make clear, today the conquistadors are pillaging on their home turf as
well.

That may prove to have been a grave strategic error. As Montana-based
environmental writer and activist Nick Engelfried puts it, "Every fracking well
placed near a city's water supply and every coal train rolling through a small town
gives some community a reason to hate fossil industries. And by failing to notice

this, oil, gas and coal companies may be digging their political graves."

None of this means that environmental impacts are suddenly evenly distributed.
Historically marginalized people in the Global South, as well as communities of
color in the Global North, are still at far greater risk of living downstream from a
mine, next door to a refinery, or next to a pipeline, just as they are more vulnerable
to the impacts of climate change. But in the era of extreme energy, there is no
longer the illusion of discreet sacrifice zones anymore. As Deeohn Ferris, formerly

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with the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, aptly put it, "we're all
in the same sinking boat, only people of color are closest to the hole." 52

Another boundary breaker is, of course, climate change. Because while there are
still plenty of people who are fortunate enough to live somewhere that is not (yet)
directly threatened by the extreme energy frenzy, no one is exempt from the real-
world impacts of increasingly extreme weather, or from the simmering
psychological stress of knowing that we may very well grow old — and our young
children may well grow up — in a climate significantly more treacherous than the
one we currently enjoy. Like an oil spill that spreads from open water into
wetlands, beaches, riverbeds, and down to the ocean floor, its toxins reverberating
through the lifecycles of countless species, the sacrifice zones created by our
collective fossil fuel dependence are creeping and spreading like great shadows
over the earth. After two centuries of pretending that we could quarantine the
collateral damage of this filthy habit, fobbing the risks off on others, the game is
up, and we are all in the sacrifice zone now.

Choked in Enemy Territory

The fossil fuel industry's willingness to break the sacrifice bargain in order to reach
previously off-limits pools of carbon has galvanized the new climate movement in
several important ways. For one, the scope of many new extraction and
transportation projects has created opportunities for people whose voices are
traditionally shut out of the dominant conversation to form alliances with those
who have significantly more social power. Tar sands pipelines have proven to be
a particularly potent silo buster in this regard, and something of a gift to political
organizing.

Beginning in northern Alberta, in a region where the worst impacts are being
felt by Indigenous people, and often ending in places where the worst health
impacts are felt by urban communities of color, these pipelines pass a whole lot of
other places in between. After all, the same piece of infrastructure will travel
through multiple states or provinces (or both); through the watersheds of big cities
and tiny towns; through farmlands and fishing rivers; through more lands claimed
by Indigenous people and through land occupied by the upper middle class. And
despite their huge differences, everyone along the route is up against a common
threat and therefore are potential allies. In the 1990s, it was trade deals that brought
huge and unlikely coalitions together; today it is fossil fuel infrastructure.

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Before the most recent push into extreme energy, Big Oil and Big Coal had
grown accustomed to operating in regions where they are so economically
omnipotent that they pretty much ran the show. In places like Louisiana, Alberta,
and Kentucky — not to mention Nigeria and, until the Chavez era, Venezuela — the
fossil fuel companies treat politicians as their unofficial PR wings and the
judiciaries as their own personal legal departments. With so many jobs, and such
a large percentage of the tax base on the line, regular people put up with an awful
lot too. For instance, even after the Deep water Horizon disaster, many Louisianans
wanted higher safety standards and a bigger share of the royalties from offshore
oil wealth — but most didn't join calls for a moratorium on deepwater drilling,
despite all they had suffered.

This is the Catch-22 of the fossil fuel economy: precisely because these activities
are so dirty and disruptive, they tend to weaken or even destroy other economic
drivers: fish stocks are hurt by pollution, the scarred landscape becomes less
attractive to tourists, and farmland becomes unhealthy. But rather than spark a
popular backlash, this slow poisoning can end up strengthening the power of the
fossil fuel companies because they end up being virtually the only game in town.

As the extractive industries charge into territories previously considered out of
bounds, however, they are suddenly finding themselves up against people who are
far less compromised. In many of the new carbon frontiers, as well as in territories
through which fossil fuel companies must move their product, the water is still
relatively clean, the relationship to the land is still strong — and there are a great
many people willing to fight very hard to protect ways of life that they view as
inherently incompatible with toxic extraction.

For instance, one of the natural gas industry's biggest strategic mistakes was
deciding it wanted to frack in and around Ithaca, New York — a liberal college town
with a vibrant economic localization movement and blessed with breathtaking
gorges and waterfalls. Faced with a direct threat to its idyllic community, Ithaca
became not just a hub for anti-fracking activism but a center for serious academic
research into the unexplored risksdt's likely no coincidence that researchers at
Cornell University, based in Ithaca, produced the game-changing study on
methane emissions linked to fracking, whose findings became an indispensable
tool for the global resistance movement. And it was the industry' s great misfortune
that famed biologist and author Sandra Steingraber, a world-renowned expert on
the link between industrial toxins and cancer, had recently taken up a post at Ithaca
College. Steingraber threw herself into the fracking fight, providing expert
testimony before countless audiences and helping to mobilize tens of thousands of

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New Yorkers. This work contributed to not just keeping the frackers out of Ithaca
but to a total of nearly 180 fracking bans or moratoria adopted by cities and towns

across the state.

The industry badly miscalculated again when it began construction on a 12,260-
horsepower compressor station carrying Pennsylvania's fracked gas smack in the
middle of the town of Minisink, New York. Many homes were within half a mile
of the facility, including one just 180 meters away. And the town's residents
weren't the only ones whose health was threatened by the station. The surrounding
area is prized agricultural land dotted with small family farms, orchards, and
vineyards growing organic and artisanal produce for New York's farmer's markets
and locavore restaurants. So Millennium Pipeline — the company behind the
compressor — found itself up against not just a bunch of angry, local farmers but
also a whole lot of angry New York City hipsters, celebrity chefs, and movie stars
like Mark Ruffalo, calling not just for an end to fracking but for the state to shift

to 100 percent renewables.

And then there was the almost unfathomably stupid idea of trying to open up
some of Europe's first major fracking operations nowhere other than the South of
France. When residents of the Department of Var — known for its olives, figs,
sheep, and for the famed beaches of Saint-Tropez — discovered that several of their
communities were in line for gas fracking, they organized furiously. Economist
and activist Maxime Combes describes scenes around southern France at the
inception of the movement, where "the halls of the town-meetings in impacted
communities were packed to overflowing, and very often, there were more
participants in these meetings than inhabitants in the villages." Var, Combes wrote,
would soon experience "the largest citizen's mobilization seen in the history of a
Departmentthat is usually on the right of the political spectrum." As a result of the
industry's French folly, it ended up not just losing the right to frack near the Riviera
(at least for now), but in 2011 France became the first country to adopt a

nationwide fracking ban.

Even something as routine as getting heavy machinery up to northern Alberta to
keep the tar sands mines and upgraders running has ignited new resistance
movements. In keeping with the mammoth scale of everything associated with the
largest industrial project on earth, the machines being transported, which are
manufactured in South Korea, can be about as long and heavy as a Boeing 747,
and some of the "heavy hauls," as they are called, are three stories high. The
shipments are so large, in fact, that these behemoths cannot be trucked normally.
Instead, oil companies like ExxonMobil have to load them onto specialty trailers

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that take up more than two lanes of highway, and are too high to make it under
most standard overpasses ~

The only roads that meet the oil companies' needs are located in distinctly
hostile territory. For instance, communities in Montana and Idaho have led a fierce
multi-year campaign to prevent the rigs from traveling along the scenic but narrow
Highway 12. They object to the human costs of having their critical roadway
blocked for hours so that the huge machines can pass, as well as to the
environmental risks of a load toppling on one of many hairpin turns and ending up
in a stream or river (this is fly-fishing country and locals are passionate about their
wild rivers).

In October 2010, a small crew of local activists took me on a drive along the part
of Highway 12 that the so-called big rigs would have to travel. We went past
groves of cedar and Douglas fir and glowing, golden-tipped larch, past signs for
moose crossings and under towering rock outcroppings. As we drove, with fall
leaves rushing downstream in Lolo Creek next to the road, my guides scouted
locations for an "action camp" they were planning. It would bring together anti-
tar sands activists from Alberta, ranchers, and Indigenous tribes all along the
proposed route of the Keystone XL pipeline, and locals interested in stopping the
big rigs on Highway 12. They discussed a friend who had offered to set up a mobile
kitchen and the logistics of camping in early winter. Marty Cobenais, then the
pipeline campaigner for the Indigenous Environmental Network, explained how
all the campaigns are connected. "If they can stop the rigs here then it affects the
[production] capacity in the tar sands to get the oil to put in the pipelines." Then
he smiles. "That's why we are building a Cowboys and Indians alliance."^

Following a long fight, the rigs were ultimately barred from this section of
Highway 12 after the Nez Perce tribe and the conservation group Idaho Rivers
United filed a joint lawsuit. "They made a huge mistake trying to go through
western Montana and Idaho," Alexis Bonogofsky, a Billings, Montana, based goat

rancher and activist, told me. "It's been fun to watch."

An alternate route for the huge trucks was eventually found, this one taking them
through eastern Oregon. Another bad move. When the first load made its way
through the state in December 2013, it was stopped several times by activist
lockdowns and blockades. Members of the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla
Indian Reservation, objecting to the loads crossing their ancestral lands, led a
prayer ceremony near the second shipment in Pendleton, Oregon. And though local
concerns about the safety of the big rigs were real, many participants were clear
that they were primarily motivated by fears over what these machines were helping

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to do to our climate once they arrived at their destination. "This has gone too far,"
said one Umatilla blockader before she was arrested. "Our children are going to
die from this."

Indeed, the oil and coal industries are no doubt cursing the day that they ever
encountered the Pacific Northwest — Oregon, Washington State, and British
Columbia. There the sector has had to confront a powerful combination of
resurgent Indigenous Nations, farmers, and fishers whose livelihoods depend on
clean water and soil, and a great many relative newcomers who have chosen to live
in that part of the world because of its natural beauty. It is also, significantly, a
region where the local environmental movement never fully succumbed to the
temptations of the corporate partnership model, and where there is a long and
radical history of land-based direct action to stop clear-cut logging and dirty
mining.

This has meant fierce opposition to tar sands pipelines, as we have seen. And
the deep-seated ecological values of the Pacific Northwest have also become the
bane of the U.S. coal industry in recent years. Between grassroots resistance to
building new coal-fired plants, and pressure to shut down old ones, as well as the
rapid rise of natural gas, the market for coal in the United States has collapsed. In
a span of just four years, between 2008 and 2012, coal's share of U.S. electricity
generation plummeted from about 50 percent to 37 percent. That means that if the
industry is to have a future, it needs to ship U.S. coal to parts of the world that still
want it in large quantities. That means Asia. (It's a strategy that global energy
expert and author Michael T. Klare has compared to the one tobacco companies
began to employ a few decades ago: "Just as health officials now condemn Big
Tobacco's emphasis on cigarette sales to poor people in countries with inadequate
health systems," he writes, "so someday Big Energy's new 'smoking' habit will
be deemed a massive threat to human survival.") The problem for the coal
companies is that U.S. ports along the Pacific Coast are not equipped for such large
coal shipments, which means that the industry needs to build new terminals. It also
needs to dramatically increase the number of trains carrying coal from the massive

mines of the Powder River Basin, in Wyoming and Montana, to the Northwest.

As with the tar sands pipelines and the heavy hauls, the greatest obstacle to the
coal industry's plans to reach the sea has been the defiant refusal of residents of
the Pacific Northwest to play along. Every community in Washington State and
Oregon that was slated to become the new home of a coal export terminal rose up
in protest, fueled by health concerns about coal dust, but also, once again, by larger
concerns about the global impact of burning all that coal.

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This was expressed forcefully by KC Golden, who has helped to usher in many
of the most visionary climate policies in Washington State, when he wrote: "The
great Pacific Northwest is not a global coal depot, a pusher for fossil fuel addiction,
a logistics hub for climate devastation. We're the last place on Earth that should
settle for a tired old retread of the false choice between jobs and the environment.
Coal export is fundamentally inconsistent with our vision and values. It's not just
a slap in the face to 'green' groups. It's a moral disaster and an affront to our
identity as a community."^ After all, what is the point of installing solar panels
and rainwater barrels if they are going to be coated in coal dust?

What these campaigns are discovering is that while it's next to impossible to
win a direct fight against the fossil fuel companies on their home turf, the chances
of victory greatly increase when the battleground extends into a territory where the
industry is significantly weaker — places where nonextractive ways of life still
flourish and where residents (and politicians) are less addicted to petro and coal
dollars. And as the corroded tentacles of extreme energy reach out in all directions
like a giant metal spider, the industry is pushing into a whole lot of those kinds of
places.

Something else is going on too. As resistance to the extractive industries gains
ground along these far-flung limbs, it is starting to spread back to the body of
carbon country — lending new courage to resist even in those places that the fossil
fuel industry thought it had already conquered.

The city of Richmond, California, across the bay from San Francisco, provides
a glimpse of how quickly the political landscape can change. Predominantly
African American and Latino, the city is a rough-edged, working-class pocket
amidst the relentless tech-fuelled gentrification of the Bay Area. In Richmond, the
big employer isn't Google, it's Chevron, whose huge refinery local residents blame
for myriad health and safety problems, from elevated asthma rates to frequent
accidents at the hulking facility (including a massive fire in 1999 that sent hundreds
to hospital). And yet as the city's largest business and employer Chevron still had
the power to call the shots. ~

No more. In 2009 community members successfully blocked a plan by Chevron
to significantly expand its oil refinery, which could have allowed the plant to
process heavier, dirtier crudes such as bitumen from the tar sands. A coalition of
environmental justice groups challenged the expansion in the streets and in the
courts, arguing that it would further pollute Richmond's air. In the end, a superior
court ruled against Chevron, citing a wholly inadequate environmental impact
report (which "fails as an informational document," the judge tartly remarked).

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Chevron appealed, but in 2010 it lost again. "This is a victory for the grassroots,
and the people who have been suffering the health impacts of the refinery for the
past 100 years," said Asian Pacific Environmental Network senior organizer Torm
Nompraseurt.

Richmond is not the only place dominated by Big Oil finding new reserves of
courage to fight back. As the anti-tar sands movement spreads through North
America and Europe, Indigenous communities in the belly of the beast — the ones
who were raising the alarm about the dangers of the tar sands long before large
environmental groups showed any interest in the issue — have also been
emboldened to go further than ever. They've launched new lawsuits for violations
of their land rights, with potentially grave ramifications for industry's access to
carbon reserves, and delegations from deeply impacted First Nations communities
are now constantly traveling the globe to alert more people to the devastation of
their territories in the hopes that more arteries will be severed. One of these
activists is Melina Laboucan-Massimo, a mesmerizing speaker with an understated
courage who has spent much of her early thirties on the road, showing ugly slides
of oil spills and ravaged landscapes and describing the silent war the oil and gas
industry is waging on her people, the Lubicon Lake First Nation. "People are
listening now," she told me, with tears in her eyes in the summer of 2013. "But it
took a long time for people to get to that place." And this, she said, means that

"there is hope. But it can be pretty dire sometimes in Alberta."

What is clear is that fighting a giant extractive industry on your own can seem
impossible, especially in a remote, sparsely populated location. But being part of
a continent- wide, even global, movement that has the industry surrounded is a very
different story.

This networking and cross-pollinating is usually invisible — it's a mood, an
energy that spreads from place to place. But for a brief time in September 2013,
Blockadia's web of inspiration was made visible. Five carvers from the Lummi
Nation in Washington State — the coastal tribe that is leading the fight against the
largest proposed coal export terminal on a contested piece of the West Coast —
showed up in Otter Creek, Montana. They had traveled roughly 1,300 kilometers
from their home territory of mountainous temperate rainforest and craggy Pacific
beaches to southeastern Montana's parched grasses and gentle hills, carrying with
them a twenty-two-foot cedar totem pole, strapped to a flatbed truck. Otter Creek
is the site of a planned massive coal mine and the Lummi visitors stood on that
spot, which until recently had been written off as doomed, with more than a
hundred people from the nearby Northern Cheyenne Reservation, as well as a

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group of local cattle ranchers. Together, they explored the ways in which they had
been brought together by the ambitions of the carbon frenzy.

If the Otter Creek mine were built in the Powder River Basin, it would
compromise the water and air for the ranchers and the Northern Cheyenne, and the
railway transporting the coal to the west coast could disturb the Cheyenne's ancient
burial grounds. The export port, meanwhile, was set to be built on one of the
Lummi's ancient burial grounds, and the coal would then be carried on barges that
would disrupt their fishing areas and potentially threaten many livelihoods.

The group stood in the valley by the banks of Otter Creek, under a sunny sky
with hawks flying overhead, and blessed the totem pole with pipe smoke, vowing
to fight together to keep the coal under their feet in the ground, and to keep both
the railway and port from being built. The Lummi carvers then strapped the totem
pole — which they had named Kwel hoy' or "We Draw the Line" — back onto the
truck and took it on a sixteen-day journey to eight other communities, all of whom
found themselves in the path of coal trains, big rigs, or tar sands pipelines and oil
tankers. There were ceremonies at every stop, as the visitors and their hosts — both
Native and non-Native — together drew connections among their various local
battles against the extractive industries. The journey ended on Tsleil-Waututh land
in North Vancouver, a pivotal community in the fight against increased oil tanker
traffic. There the totem pole was permanently planted, looking out at the Pacific.

While in Montana, Lummi master carver Jewell Praying Wolf James explained
the purpose of the long journey: "We're concerned about protecting the
environment as well as people's health all the way from the Powder River to the
West Coast.. . . We're traveling across the country to help unify people's voices. It
doesn't matter who you are, where you are at or what race you are — red, black,

white or yellow — we're all in this together."

This kind of alliance building among the various outposts of Blockadia has proven
the movement's critics wrong time and time again. When the campaign against the
Keystone XL pipeline began to gather momentum, several high-profile pundits
insisted that it was all a waste of valuable time and energy. The oil would get out
through another route regardless, and in the grand scheme of things the carbon it
would carry represented little more than "a rounding error," as Jonathan Chait
wrote in New York magazine. Better, they argued, to fight for a carbon tax, or for
stronger EPA regulations, or for a reincarnation of cap-and-trade. New York
Times columnist Joe Nocera went so far as to call the strategy "utterly

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boneheaded," and accused James Hansen, whose congressional testimony
launched the modern climate movement, of "hurting the very cause he claims to
care so much about."

What we now know is that Keystone was always about much more than a
pipeline. It was a new fighting spirit, and one that is contagious. One battle doesn't
rob from another but rather causes battles to multiply, with each act of courage,
and each victory, inspiring others to strengthen their resolve.

The BP Factor: No Trust

Beyond the fossil fuel industry's pace of expansion, and its forays into hostile
territory, something else has propelled this movement forward in recent years. That
is the widespread conviction that today's extractive activities are significantly
higher risk than their predecessors: tar sands oil is unquestionably more disruptive
and damaging to local ecosystems than conventional crude. Many believe it to be
more dangerous to transport, and once spilled harder to clean up. A similar risk
escalation is present in the shift to fracked oil and gas; in the shift from shallow to
deepwater drilling (as the BP disaster showed); and most dramatically, in the move
from warm water to Arctic drilling. Communities in the path of unconventional
energy projects are convinced they are being asked to risk a hell of a lot, and much
of the time they are being offered very little in return for their sacrifice, whether
lasting jobs or significant royalties.

Industry and government, for their part, have been extremely reluctant to
acknowledge, let alone act upon, the stepped- up risks of extreme energy. For years,
rail companies and officials have largely treated fracked oil from the Bakken as if
it were the same as conventional crude — never mind the mounting evidence that it
is significantly more volatile. (After announcing some mostly voluntary new safety
measures beginning in early 2014 that were generally deemed inadequate, U.S.
regulators claim to be in the process of developing a variety of tougher rules for
oil-by-rail transport.)^

Similarly, government and industry are pushing the vast expansion of pipelines
carrying oil from the Alberta tar sands despite a paucity of reliable, peer-reviewed
research assessing whether dilbit, as diluted bitumen is called, is more prone to
spill than conventional oil. But there is good reason for concern. As a joint 2011
report published by the Natural Resources Defense Council, the Sierra Club, and
others notes, "There are many indications that dilbit is significantly more corrosive

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to pipeline systems than conventional crude. For example, the Alberta pipeline
system has had approximately sixteen times as many spills due to internal
corrosion as the U.S. system. Yet, the safety and spill response standards used by
the United States to regulate pipeline transport of bitumen are designed for
conventional oil."

Meanwhile, there are huge gaps in our knowledge about how spilled tar sands
oil behaves in water. Over the last decade, there have been few studies published
on the subject, and almost all were commissioned by the oil industry. However, a
recent investigation by Environment Canada contained several disturbing findings,
including that diluted tar sands oil sinks in saltwater "when battered by waves and
mixed with sediments" (rather than floating on the ocean surface where it can be
partially recovered) and that dispersants like those used during BP's Deepwater
Horizon disaster have only "a limited effect," according to a report in The Globe
and Mail. And there has been virtually no formal research at all on the particular

risks of transporting tar sands oil via truck or rail.

Similarly, large knowledge gaps exist in our understanding of the ecological and
human health impact of the Alberta tar sands themselves, with their enormous
open-pit mines, dump trucks that can reach up to five stories high, and roaring
upgraders. In huge swaths of country surrounding Fort McMurray, ground zero of
Canada's bitumen boom, the boreal forest — once a verdant, spongy bog — has been
sucked dry of life. Every few minutes, the rancid air is punctured by the sound of
booming cannons, meant to keep migrating birds from landing on the strange

*69

liquid silver surface of the huge tailing ponds. In Alberta the centuries-old war
to control nature is not a metaphor; it is a very real war, complete with artillery.

The oil companies, of course, say that they are using the safest methods of
environmental protection; that the vast tailings ponds are secure; that water is still
safe to drink (though workers stick to bottled); that the land will soon be
"reclaimed" and returned to moose and black bears (if any are still around). And
despite years of complaints from First Nations communities like the Athabasca
Chipewyan, situated downstream from the mines along the Athabasca River,
industry and government continued to insist that whatever organic contaminants
are found in the river are "naturally occurring" — this is an oil-rich region after all.

To anyone who has witnessed the scale of the tar sands operation, the assurances
seem implausible. The government has yet to establish a genuinely independent,
comprehensive system for monitoring mining impacts on the surrounding
watersheds — in an industrial project whose total worth is approaching $500
billion. After it announced a flashy new federal-provincial monitoring program in

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2012, the PR effort quickly spiraled out of its control. Referring to new findings
from government and independent researchers, Bill Donahue, an environmental
scientist with an advisory role in the program, said in February 2014 that "not only
are those tailings ponds leaking, but it looks like it is flowing pretty much from
those tailings ponds, through the ground and into the Athabasca River." He added:
"So, there goes ... that message we've been hearing about. 'These tailings ponds
are safe, they don't leak,' and so on." In a separate incident, a team of government
scientists with Environment Canada corroborated outside research on widespread
contamination of snow around tar sands operations, though the Harper

administration did its best to keep the researchers from speaking to the press.

And there are still no comprehensive studies on the impacts of this pollution on
human health. On the contrary, some who have chosen to speak out have faced
severe reprisals. Most notable had been the experience of John O'Connor, a gentle,
gray-bearded family doctor who still speaks with an accent from his native Ireland.
In 2003, O'Connor began to report that, while treating patients in Fort Chipewyan,
he was coming across alarming numbers of cancers, including extremely rare and
aggressive bile-duct malignancies. He quickly found himself under fire from
federal health regulators, who filed several misconduct charges against him with
the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Alberta (including raising "undue
alarm"). "I don't know, personally, of any situation where a doctor has had to go
through what I've gone through," O'Connor has said of the reputational smears
and the years spent fighting the allegations. He was, eventually, cleared of all
charges and a subsequent investigation of cancer rates vindicated several of his

warnings.

But before that happened the message to other doctors was sent: a report
commissioned by the Alberta Energy Regulator recently found a "marked
reluctance to speak out" in the medical community about the health impact of the
tar sands, with several interviewees pointing to Dr. O'Connor's experience.
("Physicians are quite frankly afraid to diagnose health conditions linked to the oil
and gas industry," concluded the toxicologist who authored the report.) It has
become routine, moreover, for the federal government to prevent senior
environmental and climate scientists from speaking to journalists about any
environmentally sensitive subjects. ("I'm available when media relations says I'm

available," as one scientist told Postmedia.)

And this is just one facet of what has become known as Prime Minister Stephen
Harper's "war on science," with environmental monitoring budgets relentlessly
slashed, covering everything from oil spills and industrial air pollution to the

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broader impacts of climate change. Since 2008, more than two thousand scientists

have lost their jobs as a result of the cuts.

This is, of course, a strategy. Only by systematically failing to conduct basic
research, and silencing experts who are properly tasked to investigate health and
environmental concerns, can industry and government continue to make absurdly

*74

upbeat claims about how all is under control in the oil patch.

A similar willful blindness pervades the rapid spread of hydraulic fracking. For
years the U.S. gas industry responded to reports of contaminated water wells by
insisting that there was no scientific proof of any connection between fracking and
the fact that residents living near gas drilling suddenly found they could set their
tap water on fire. But the reason there was no evidence was because the industry
had won an unprecedented exemption from federal monitoring and regulation —
the so-called Halliburton Loophole, ushered in under the administration of George
W. Bush. The loophole exempted most fracking from regulations of the Safe
Drinking Water Act, helping to ensure that companies did not have to report any
of the chemicals they were injecting underground to the Environmental Protection
Agency, while shielding their use of the riskiest chemicals from EPA

oversight. And if no one knows what you are putting into the ground, it's tough
to make a definitive link when those toxins start coming out of people's taps.

And yet as more evidence emerges, it is coming down hard on one side. A
growing body of independent, peer-reviewed studies is building the case that
fracking puts drinking water, including aquifers, at risk. In July 2013, for instance,
a Duke University-led paper analyzed dozens of drinking water wells in
northeastern Pennsylvania's Marcellus Shale region. The researchers found that
the level of contamination from methane, ethane, and propane closely correlated
with proximity to wells for shale gas. The industry response is that this is just
natural leakage in regions rich in gas (the same line that tar sands operators in
Alberta used when organic pollutants are found in the water there). But this study
found that while methane was present in most of the sampled water wells, the
concentration was six times higher in those within a kilometer of a gas well. In a
study not yet published, the Duke team also analyzed water wells in Texas that had
been previously declared safe. There, they found that contrary to assurances from
government and industry, methane levels in many wells exceeded the minimum
safety level set by the U.S. Geological Survey.

The links between fracking and small earthquakes are also solidifying. In 2012,
a University of Texas research scientist analyzed seismic activity from November
2009 to September 201 1 over part of the huge Barnett Shale region in Texas, which

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lies under Fort Worth and parts of Dallas, and found the epicenters of sixty-seven

small earthquakes. The most reliably located earthquakes were within two miles
of an injection well. A July 2013 study in the Journal of Geophysical
Research linked fracking-related waste injection to 109 small earthquakes that
took place in a single year around Youngstown, Ohio, where an earthquake had
not been previously recorded since monitoring began in the eighteenth century.
The lead researcher of a similar study, published in Science, explained, "The fluids

[in wastewater injection wells] are driving the faults to their tipping point."

All of this illustrates what is so unsettling about unconventional extraction
methods. Conventional oil and gas drilling, as well as underground coal mining,
are destructive, to be sure. But comparatively speaking, they are the fossil fuel
equivalent of the surgeon's scalpel — the carbon is extracted with relatively small
incisions. But extreme, or unconventional extraction takes a sledgehammer to the
whole vicinity. When the sledgehammer strikes the surface of the land — as in the
case of mountaintop coal removal and open-pit tar sands — the violence can be seen
with the naked eye. But with fracking, deepwater drilling, and underground ("in
situ") tar sands extraction, the sledgehammer aims deep underground. At first this
can seem more benign, since the impacts are less visible. Yet over and over again,
we are catching glimpses of how badly we are breaking critical parts of our
ecosystems that our best experts have no idea how to fix.

Educated by Disaster

In Blockadia outposts around the world, the initials "BP" act as a kind of mantra
or invocation — shorthand for: whatever you do, take no extractive company at its
word. The initials mean that passivity and trust in the face of assurances about
world-class technology and cutting-edge safety measures are recipes for
flammable water in your faucet, an oil slick in your backyard, or a train explosion
down the street.

Indeed, many Blockadia activists cite the 2010 BP disaster in the Gulf of Mexico
as either their political awakening, or the moment they realized they absolutely had
to win their various battles against extreme energy. The facts of that case are
familiar but bear repeating. In what became the largest accidental marine oil spill
in history, a state-of-the-art offshore oil rig exploded, killing eleven workers, while
oil gushed from the ruptured Macondo wellhead about one and a half kilometers
below the surface. What made the strongest impression on the horrified public was

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not the tar-coated tourist beaches in Florida or the oil-soaked pelicans in Louisiana.
It was the harrowing combination of the oil giant's complete lack of preparedness
for a blowout at those depths, as it scrambled for failed fix after failed fix, and the
cluelessness of the government regulators and responders. Not only had regulators
taken BP at its word about the supposed safety of the operation, but government
agencies were so ill-equipped to deal with the scale of the disaster that they allowed
BP — the perpetrator — to be in charge of the cleanup. As the world watched, the
experts were clearly making it up as they went along.

The investigations and lawsuits that followed revealed that a desire to save
money had played an important role in creating the conditions for the accident. For
instance, as Washington raced to reestablish lost credibility, an investigation by a
U.S. Interior Department agency found "BP's cost or time saving decisions
without considering contingencies and mitigation were contributing causes of the
Macondo blowout." A report from the specially created Presidential Oil Spill
Commission similarly found, "Whether purposeful or not, many of the decisions
that BP, [and its contractors] Halliburton and Transocean, made that increased the
risk of the Macondo blowout clearly saved those companies significant time (and
money)." Jackie Savitz, a marine scientist and a vice president at the conservation
group Oceana, was more direct: BP "put profits before precautions. They let dollar

signs drive a culture of risk-taking that led to this unacceptable outcome." And
any notion that this was a problem unique to BP was quickly dispelled when —
only ten days after crews stopped the gush of oil into the Gulf of Mexico — an
Enbridge pipeline burst in Michigan, causing the largest onshore oil spill in U.S.
history. The pipe ruptured in a tributary of the Kalamazoo River and quickly
contaminated more than fifty-five kilometers of waterways and wetlands with over
one million gallons of oil, which left swans, muskrats, and turtles coated in black
gunk. Homes were evacuated, local residents sickened, and onlookers watched "an
alarming brown mist rise as river water the shade of a dark chocolate malt

tumbled" over a local dam, according to one report.

Like BP, it seemed that Enbridge had put profits before basic safety, while
regulators slept at the switch. For instance, it turned out that Enbridge had known
as early as 2005 that the section of pipeline that failed was corroding, and by 2009
the company had identified 329 other defects in the line stretching through
southern Michigan that were serious enough to require immediate repair under
federal rules. The $40 billion company was granted an extension, and applied for
a second one just ten days before the rupture — the same day an Enbridge VP told
Congress that the company could mount an "almost instantaneous" response to a

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leak. In fact it took them seventeen hours to close the valve on the leaking pipeline.
Three years after the initial disaster, about 180,000 gallons of oil were still sitting

8 1

on the bottom of the Kalamazoo.

As in the Gulf, where BP had been drilling at depths unheard of just a few years
earlier, the Kalamazoo disaster was also linked to the new era of extreme, higher-
risk fossil fuel extraction. It took a while, however, before that became clear. For
more than a week Enbridge did not share with the public the very pertinent fact
that the substance that had leaked was not conventional crude; it was diluted
bitumen, piped from the Alberta tar sands through Michigan. In fact in the early
days, Enbridge' s then CEO, Patrick Daniel, flatly denied that the oil came from
the tar sands and was later forced to backtrack. "What I indicated is that it was not
what we have traditionally referred to as tar sands oil," Daniel claimed of bitumen
thatcertainly had come from the tar sands. "If it is part of the same geological

formation, then I bow to that expert opinion."

In the fall of 2010, with many of these disasters still under way, Marty Cobenais
of the Indigenous Environmental Network told me that the summer of spills was
having a huge impact on communities in the path of new infrastructure projects,
whether big rigs, pipelines, or tankers. "The oil industry always says there is 0
percent chance of their oil hitting the shores, but with BP, we saw that it did. Their
projections are always wrong," he said, adding, "They are always talking about

'fail-proof but with Kalamazoo we saw they couldn't turn it off for hours."

In other words, a great many people are no longer believing what the industry
experts tell them; they are believing what they see. And over the last few years we
have all seen a whole lot. Unforgettable images from the bizarre underwater "spill-
cam" showing BP's oil gushing for three long months into the Gulf merge
seamlessly with shocking footage of methane-laced tap water being set on fire in
fracking country, which in turn meld with the grief of Quebec's Lac-Megantic after
the horrific train explosion, with family members searching through the rubble for
signs of their loved ones, which in turn fade to memories of 300,000 people in
West Virginia being told they could not drink or bathe in their tap water for up to
ten days after it had been contaminated by chemicals used in coal mining. And
then there was the spectacle in 2012 of Shell's first foray into the highest-risk
gambit of all: Arctic drilling. Highlights included one of Shell's giant drill rigs
breaking free from its tow and running aground on the coast of Sitkalidak Island;
another rig slipping its anchorage; and an oil spill containment dome being
"crushed like a beer can," according to a U.S. Bureau of Safety and Environmental

Enforcement official.

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If it seems like there are more such spills and accidents than before, that's
because there are. According to a months-long investigation by EnergyWire, in
2012 there were more than six thousand spills and "other mishaps" at onshore oil
and gas sites in the U.S. "That's an average of more than 16 spills a day. And it's
a significant increase since 2010. In the 12 states where comparable data were
available, spills were up about 17 percent." There is also evidence that companies
are doing a poorer job of cleaning up their messes: in an investigation of pipeline
leaks of hazardous liquids (mostly petroleum-related), The New York Times found
that in 2005 and 2006 pipeline operators reported "recovering more than 60 percent
of liquids spilled"; between 2007 and 2010 "operators recovered less than a
third."-

It's not just the engineering failures that are feeding widespread mistrust. As
with BP and Enbridge, it's the constant stream of revelations about the role that
greed — fully liberated by lax regulation and monitoring — seems to have played in
stacking the deck. For example, Shell's Arctic rig ran aground when it braved
fierce weather in an apparent attempt by the company to get out of Alaska in time

to avoid paying additional taxes in the state.

And Montreal, Maine & Atlantic (MM&A), the rail company behind the Lac-
Megantic disaster, had received, one year before the accident, government
permission to cut the number of staff on its trains to a single engineer. Until the
1980s, trains like the one that derailed were generally staffed by five employees,
all sharing the duties of operating safely. Now it's down to two — but for MM&A,
that was still too much. According to one of the company's former railway
workers, "It was all about cutting, cutting, cutting." Compounding these risks,
according to a four-month Globe and Mail investigation, "companies often don't
test their oil shipments for explosiveness before sending the trains." Little wonder
then that within a year of Lac-Megantic, several more oil-laden trains went up in
flames, including one in Casselton, North Dakota, one outside a village in

northwest New Brunswick, and one in downtown Lynchburg, Virginia.

In a sane world, this cluster of disasters, layered on top of the larger climate
crisis, would have prompted significant political change. Caps and moratoriums
would have been issued, and the shift away from extreme energy would have
begun. The fact that nothing of the sort has happened, and that permits and leases
are still being handed out for ever more dangerous extractive activities, is at least
partly due to old-fashioned corruption — of both the legal and illegal varieties.

A particularly lurid episode was revealed a year and a half before the BP disaster.
An internal U.S. government report pronounced that what was then called the

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Minerals Management Service — the division of the U.S. Interior Department
charged with collecting royalty payments from the oil and gas industry — suffered
from "a culture of ethical failure." Not only had officials repeatedly accepted gifts
from oil industry employees but, according to a report by the department's
inspector general, several officials "frequently consumed alcohol at industry
functions, had used cocaine and marijuana, and had sexual relationships with oil
and gas company representatives." For a public that had long suspected that their
public servants were in bed with the oil and gas lobby, this was pretty graphic

^ 88

proof.

Little wonder, then, that a 2013 Harris poll found that a paltry 4 percent of U.S.
respondents believe oil companies are "honest and trustworthy" (only the tobacco
industry fared worse). That same year, Gallup polled Americans about their
opinions of twenty-five industries, including banking and government. No industry
was more disliked than the oil and gas sector. A 2012 poll in Canada, meanwhile,
asked Canadians to rate each of eleven groups on their trustworthiness on "energy
issues." Oil and gas firms and energy executives took the bottom two slots, well
below academics (the most trusted group), as well as environmental and
community groups (which also rated positively). And in an EU-wide survey that
same year, participants were polled on their impressions of eleven different sectors
and asked if they "make efforts to behave responsibly towards society" — along
with finance and banking, mining and oil and gas companies again came in last

place.

Hard realities like these have posed a challenge to the highly paid spin doctors
employed by the extractive industries, the ones who had grown accustomed to
being able to gloss over pretty much any controversy with sleek advertising
showing blond children running through fields and multiracial actors in lab coats
expressing concern about the environment. These days that doesn't cut it. No
matter how many millions are spent on advertising campaigns touting the
modernity of the tar sands or the cleanliness of natural gas, it's clear that a great
many people are no longer being persuaded. And those proving most resistant are
the ones whose opinions matter most: the people living on lands that the extractive
companies need to access in order to keep their astronomical profits flowing.

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The Return of Precaution

For decades, the environmental movement spoke the borrowed language of risk
assessment, diligently working with partners in business and government to
balance dangerous levels of pollution against the need for profit and economic
growth. These assumptions about acceptable levels of risk were taken so deeply
for granted that they formed the basis of the official climate change discussion.
Action necessary to save humanity from the very real risk of climate chaos was
coolly balanced against the risk such action would pose to GDPs, as if economic
growth still has a meaning on a planet convulsing in serial disasters.

But in Blockadia, risk assessment has been abandoned on the barricaded
roadside, replaced by a resurgence of the precautionary principle — which holds
that when human health and the environment are significantly at risk, perfect
scientific certainty is not required before taking action. Moreover the burden of
proving that a practice is safe should not be placed on the public that could be
harmed.

Blockadia is turning the tables, insisting that it is up to industry to prove that its
methods are safe — and in the era of extreme energy that is something that simply
cannot be done. To quote the biologist Sandra Steingraber, "Can you provide an
example of an ecosystem on which was laid down a barrage of poisons, and terrible

and unexpected consequences for human beings were not the result?"

The fossil fuel companies, in short, are no longer dealing with those Big Green
groups that can be silenced with a generous donation or a conscience-clearing
carbon offset program. The communities they are facing are, for the most part, not
looking to negotiate a better deal — whether in the form of local jobs, higher
royalties, or better safety standards. More and more, these communities are simply
saying "No." No to the pipeline. No to Arctic drilling. No to the coal and oil trains.
No to the heavy hauls. No to the export terminal. No to fracking. And not just "Not
in My Backyard" but, as the French anti-fracking activists say: Ni ici, ni ailleurs —
neither here, nor elsewhere. In other words: no new carbon frontiers.

Indeed the trusty slur NIMBY has completely lost its bite. As Wendell Berry
says, borrowing words from E. M. Forster, conservation "turns on affection" — and
if each of us loved our homeplace enough to defend it, there would be no ecological

crisis, no place could ever be written off as a sacrifice zone. We would simply
have no choice but to adopt nonpoisonous methods of meeting our needs.

This sense of moral clarity, after so many decades of chummy green
partnerships, is the real shock for the extractive industries. The climate movement
has found its nonnegotiables. This fortitude is not just building a large and militant

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resistance to the companies most responsible for the climate crisis. As we will see
in the next chapter, it is also delivering some of the most significant victories the
environmental movement has seen in decades.

The villagers insist their struggle is committed to nonviolence and blame outsiders or even provocateurs
for the arson.

~ Maxime Combes, a French economist and anti-fracking activist, observes, "The scene in the film where
landowner Mike Markham ignites gas from a water faucet in his home with a cigarette lighter due to natural
gas exploration in the area has had a far greater impact against fracking than any report or speech."

~ In 2008, 1,600 ducks died after they landed in these dangerous waters during a storm; another incident
led to the deaths of over five hundred more two years later. (A biologist investigating the later incident for
the Alberta government explained that it was not industry's fault that the ducks were forced to land during
a violent storm — then pointed out, without apparent irony, that such storms will become more frequent as
a result of climate change.)

And their claims are indeed absurd: according to an independent study published in 2014 in
the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, for example, emissions of potentially toxic pollutants
from the tar sands "are two to three orders -of-magnitude larger than those reported" by companies to their
regulators. The discrepancy is evident in actual measurements of these pollutants in the air near tar sands
activities. The study's coauthor, Frank Wania, an environmental scientist at the University of Toronto,
described the official estimates as "inadequate and incomplete" and made the commonsense observation,
"Only with a complete and accurate account of the emissions is it actually possible to make a meaningful
assessment of the environmental impact and of the risk to human health."

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LOVE WILL SAVE THIS PLACE

Democracy, Divestment, and the Wins So Far

"I believe that the more clearly we can focus our attention on the wonders
and realities of the universe about us, the less taste we shall have for
destruction."

-Rachel Carson, 1954 1
"What good is a mountain just to have a mountain?"

-Jason Bostic, Vice President of the West Virginia Coal Association, 201 1

On a drizzly British Columbia day in April 2012, a twenty- seven- seat turboprop
plane landed at the Bella Bella airport, which consists of a single landing strip
leading to a clapboard building. The passengers descending from the blue-and-
white Pacific Coastal aircraft included the three members of a review panel created
by the Canadian government. They had made the 480-kilometer journey from
Vancouver to this remote island community, a place of deep fjords and lush
evergreen forests reaching to the sea, to hold public hearings about one of the most
contentious new pieces of fossil fuel infrastructure in North America: Enbridge' s
proposed Northern Gateway pipeline.

Bella Bella is not directly on the oil pipeline's route (that is 200 kilometers even
further north). However, the Pacific ocean waters that are its front yard are in the
treacherous path of the oil tankers that the pipeline would load up with diluted tar
sands oil — up to 75 percent more oil in some supertankers than theExxon
Valdez was carrying in 1989 when it spilled in Alaska's Prince William Sound,

devastating marine life and fisheries across the region." A spill in these waters
could be even more damaging, since the remoteness would likely make reaching
an accident site difficult, especially during winter storms.

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The appointed members of the Joint Review Panel — one woman and two men,
aided by support staff — had been holding hearings about the pipeline impacts for
months now and would eventually present the federal government with their
recommendation on whether the project should go ahead. Bella Bella, whose
population is roughly 90 percent Heiltsuk First Nation, was more than ready for
them.

A line of Heiltsuk hereditary chiefs waited on the tarmac, all dressed in their full
regalia: robes embroidered with eagles, salmon, orcas, and other creatures of these
seas and skies; headdresses adorned with animal masks and long trails of white
ermine fur, as well as woven cedar basket hats. They greeted the visitors with a
welcome dance, noisemakers shaking in their hands and rattling from the aprons
of their robes, while a line of drummers and singers backed them up. On the other
side of the chain link fence was a large crowd of demonstrators carrying anti-
pipeline signs and canoe paddles.

Standing a respectful half step behind the chiefs was Jess Housty, a slight
twenty-five-year-old woman who had helped to galvanize the community's
engagement with the panel (and would soon be elected to the Heiltsuk Tribal
Council as its youngest member). An accomplished poet who created Bella Bella's
first and only library while she was still a teenager, Housty described the scene at
the airport as "the culmination of a huge planning effort driven by our whole
community.

And it was young people who had led the way, turning the local school into a
hub of organizing. Students had worked for months in preparation for the hearings.
They researched the history of pipeline and tanker spills, including the 2010
disaster on the Kalamazoo River, noting that Enbridge, the company responsible,
was the same one pushing the Northern Gateway pipeline. The teens were also
keenly interested in the Exxon Valdez disaster since it took place in a northern
landscape similar to their own. As a community built around fishing and other
ocean harvesting, they were alarmed to learn about how the salmon of Prince
William Sound had become sick in the years after the spill, and how herring stocks
had completely collapsed (they are still not fully recovered, more than two decades
later).

The students contemplated what such a spill would mean on their coast. If the
sockeye salmon, a keystone species, were threatened, it would have a cascade
effect — since they feed the killer whales and white-sided dolphins whose dorsal
fins regularly pierce the water's surface in nearby bays, as well as the seals and sea
lions that bark and sunbathe on the rocky outcroppings. And when the fish return

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to the freshwater rivers and streams to spawn, they feed the eagles, the black bears,
the grizzlies, and the wolves, whose waste then provides the nutrients to the lichen
that line the streams and riverbanks, as well as to the great cedars and Douglas firs
that tower over the temperate rainforest. It' s the salmon that connect the streams
to the rivers, the river to the sea, the sea back to the forests. Endanger salmon and
you endanger the entire ecosystem that depends on them, including the Heiltsuk
people whose ancient culture and modern livelihood is inseparable from this
intricate web of life.

Bella Bella's students wrote essays on these themes, prepared to present
testimony, and painted signs to greet the panel members. Some went on a forty-
eight-hour hunger strike to dramatize the stakes of losing their food source.
Teachers observed that no issue had ever engaged the community's young people
like this — some even noticed a decline in depression and drug use. That's a very
big deal in a place that not long ago suffered from a youth suicide epidemic, the
legacy of scarring colonial policies, including generations of children — the great-
grandparents, grandparents, and sometimes the parents of today's teens and young
adults — being taken from their families and placed in church-run residential
schools where abuse was rampant.

Housty recalls, "As I stood behind our chiefs [on the tarmac], I remember
thinking how the community had grown around the issue from the first moment
we heard rumblings around Enbridge Northern Gateway. The momentum had built
and it was strong. As a community, we were prepared to stand up with dignity and
integrity to be witnesses for the lands and waters that sustained our ancestors —
that sustain us — that we believe should sustain our future generations."

After the dance, the panel members ducked into a white minivan that took them
on the five-minute drive into town. The road was lined with hundreds of residents,
including many children, holding their handmade poster-board signs. "Oil Is
Death," "We Have the Moral Right to Say No," "Keep Our Oceans Blue," "Our
Way of Life Cannot Be Bought!," "I Can't Drink Oil." Some held drawings of
orcas, salmon, even kelp. Many of the signs simply said: "No Tankers." One man
thought the panel members weren't bothering to look out the window, so he
thumped the side of the van as it passed and held his sign up to the glass.

By some counts, a third of Bella Bella's 1,095 residents were on the street that
day, one of the largest demonstrations in the community's history. 5 Others
participated in different ways: by harvesting and preparing food for the evening
feast, where the panel members were to be honored guests. It was part of the
Heiltsuk' s tradition of hospitality but it was also a way to show the visitors the

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foods that would be at risk if just one of those supertankers were to run into trouble.
Salmon, herring roe, halibut, oolichan, crab, and prawns were all on the menu.

Similar scenes had played out everywhere the panel traveled in British
Columbia: cities and towns came out in droves, voicing unanimous or near
unanimous opposition to the project. Usually First Nations were front and center,
reflecting the fact that the province is home to what is arguably the most powerful
Indigenous land rights movement in North America, evidenced by the fact that
roughly 80 percent of its land remains "unceded," which means that it has never
been relinquished under any treaty nor has it ever been claimed by the Canadian
state through an act of war.

Yet there was clearly something about the passion of Bella Bella's greeting that
unnerved the panel members. The visitors refused the invitation to the feast that
evening, and Chief Councilor Marilyn Slett was put in the unenviable position of
having to take the microphone and share a letter she had just received from the
Joint Review Panel. It stated that the pipeline hearings for which the assembled
crowd had all been preparing for months were canceled. Apparently the
demonstration on the way from the airport had made the visitors feel unsafe and,
the letter stated, "The Panel cannot be in a situation where it is unsure that the
crowd will be peaceful." It later emerged that the sound of that single man
thumping the side of the van had somehow been mistaken for gunfire. (Police in
attendance asserted that the demonstrations had been nonviolent and that there was
never any security threat.) 2

Housty said the news of the cancellation had a "physical impact. We had done
everything according to our teachings, and to feel the back of someone's hand
could hardly have been more of an insult." In the end, the hearings went ahead but
a day and a half of promised meeting time was lost, depriving many community

members of their hope of being heard in person.

What shocked many of Bella Bella's residents was not just the weird and false
accusation of violence; it was the extent to which the entire spirit of their actions
seemed to have been misunderstood. When the panel members looked out the van
window, they evidently saw little more than a stereotypical mob of angry Indians,
wanting to vent their hatred on anyone associated with the pipeline. But to the
people on the other side of the glass, holding their paddles and fish paintings, the
demonstration had not primarily been about anger or hatred. It had been about
love — a collective and deeply felt expression of love for their breathtaking part of
the world.

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As the young people of this community explained when they finally got the
chance, their health and identity were inextricably bound up in their ability to
follow in the footsteps of their forebears — fishing and paddling in the same waters,
collecting kelp in the same tidal zones in the outer coastal islands, hunting in the
same forests, and collecting medicines in the same meadows. Which is why
Northern Gateway was seen not simply as a threat to the local fishery but as the
possible undoing of all this intergenerational healing work. And therefore as
another wave of colonial violence.

When Jess Housty testified before the Enbridge Gateway review panel (she had
to travel for a full day to Terrace, British Columbia to do it), she put this in
unequivocal terms.

When my children are born, I want them to be born into a world where hope
and transformation are possible. I want them to be born into a world where
stories still have power. I want them to grow up able to be Heiltsuk in every
sense of the word. To practice the customs and understand the identity that
has made our people strong for hundreds of generations.

That cannot happen if we do not sustain the integrity of our territory, the
lands and waters, and the stewardship practices that link our people to the
landscape. On behalf of the young people in my community, I respectfully
disagree with the notion that there is any compensation to be made for the

loss of our identity, for the loss of our right to be Heiltsuk.

The power of this ferocious love is what the resource companies and their
advocates in government inevitably underestimate, precisely because no amount
of money can extinguish it. When what is being fought for is an identity, a culture,
a beloved place that people are determined to pass on to their grandchildren, and
that their ancestors may have paid for with great sacrifice, there is nothing
companies can offer as a bargaining chip. No safety pledge will assuage; no bribe
will be big enough. And though this kind of connection to place is surely strongest
in Indigenous communities where the ties to the land go back thousands of years,
it is in fact Blockadia's defining feature.

I saw it shine brightly in Halkidiki, Greece, in the struggle against the gold mine.
There, a young mother named Melachrini Liakou — one of the movement's most
tireless leaders — told me with unswerving confidence that the difference between
the way she saw the land, as a fourth-generation farmer, and the way the mining
company saw the same patch of earth, was that, "I am a part of the land. I respect
it, I love it and I don't treat it as a useless object, as if I want to take something out
of it and then the rest will be waste. Because I want to live here this year, next year,

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and to hand it down to the generations to come. In contrast, Eldorado, and any
other mining company, they want to devour the land, to plunder it, to take away
what is most precious for themselves."^ And then they would leave behind, she
said, "a huge chemical bomb for all mankind and nature."

Alexis Bonogofsky (who had told me what a "huge mistake" the oil companies
made in trying to bring their big rigs along Highway 12) speaks in similar terms
about the fight to protect southeastern Montana from mining companies like Arch
Coal. But for Bonogofsky, a thirty-three-year-old goat rancher and
environmentalist who does yoga in her spare time, it's less about farming than deer
hunting. "It sounds ridiculous but there's this one spot where I can sit on the
sandstone rock and you know that the mule deer are coming up and migrating
through, you just watch these huge herds come through, and you know that they've
been doing that for thousands and thousands of years. And you sit there and you
feel connected to that. And sometimes it's almost like you can feel the earth
breathe." She adds: "That connection to this place and the love that people have
for it, that's what Arch Coal doesn't get. They underestimate that. They don't
understand it so they disregard it. And that's what in the end will save that place.
Is not the hatred of the coal companies, or anger, but love will save that
place. "~ This is also what makes Blockadia conflicts so intensely polarized.
Because the culture of fossil fuel extraction is — by both necessity and design —
one of extreme rootlessness. The workforce of big rig drivers, pipefitters, miners,
and engineers is, on the whole, highly mobile, moving from one worksite to the
next and very often living in the now notorious "man camps" — self-enclosed
army-base-style mobile communities that serve every need from gyms to movie
theaters (often with an underground economy in prostitution).

Even in places like Gillette, Wyoming, or Fort McMurray, Alberta, where
extractive workers may stay for decades and raise their kids, the culture remains
one of transience. Almost invariably, workers plan to leave these blighted places
as soon as they have saved enough money — enough to pay off student loans, to
buy a house for their families back home, or, for the really big dreamers, enough
to retire. And with so few well-paying blue-collar jobs left, these extraction jobs
are often the only route out of debt and poverty. It' s telling that tar sands workers
often discuss their time in northern Alberta as if it were less a job than a highly
lucrative jail term: there's "the three-year plan" (save $200,000, then leave); "the
five-year-plan" (put away half a million); "the ten-year-plan" (make a million and
retire at thirty-five). Whatever the details (and however unrealistic, given how
much money disappears in the city's notorious party scene), the plan is always

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pretty much the same: tough it out in Fort Mac (or Fort McMoney as it is often
called), then get the hell out and begin your real life. In one survey, 98 percent of

respondents in the tar sands area said they planned to retire somewhere else.^

There is a real sadness to many of these choices: beneath the bravado of the bar
scene are sky-high divorce rates due to prolonged separations and intense work
stress, soaring levels of addiction, and a great many people wishing to be anywhere
but where they are. This kind of disassociation is part of what makes it possible
for decent people to inflict the scale of damage to the land that extreme energy
demands. A coalfield worker in Gillette, Wyoming, for instance, told me that to
get through his workdays, he had trained himself to think of the Powder River

Basin as "another planet." (The moonscape left behind by strip mining no doubt
made this mental trick easier).

These are perfectly understandable survival strategies — but when the extractive
industry's culture of structural transience bumps up against a group of deeply
rooted people with an intense love of their homeplace and a determination to
protect it, the effect can be explosive.

Love and Water

When these very different worlds collide, one of the things that seems to happen
is that, as in Bella Bella, communities begin to cherish what they have — and what
they stand to lose — even more than before the extractive threat arrived. This is
particularly striking because many of the people waging the fiercest anti-extraction
battles are, at least by traditional measures, poor. But they are still determined to
defend a richness that our economy has not figured out how to count. "Our kitchens
are filled with homemade jams and preserves, sacks of nuts, crates of honey and
cheese, all produced by us," Doina Dediu, a Romanian villager protesting fracking,
told a reporter. "We are not even that poor. Maybe we don't have money, but we

have clean water and we are healthy and we just want to be left alone."

So often these battles seem to come to this stark choice: water vs. gas. Water vs.
oil. Water vs. coal. In fact, what has emerged in the movement against extreme
extraction is less an anti-fossil fuels movement than a pro-water movement.

I was first struck by this in December 201 1 when I attended a signing ceremony
for the Save the Fraser Declaration, the historic Indigenous people's declaration
pledging to prevent the Northern Gateway pipeline and any other tar sands project
of its kind from accessing British Columbia territory. More than 130 First Nations

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have signed, along with many nonlndigenous endorsers. The ceremony was held
at the Vancouver Public Library, with several chiefs present to add their names.
Among those addressing the bank of cameras that day was Marilyn Baptiste, then
elected chief of Xeni Gwet'in, one of the communities of the Tsilhqot'in First
Nation. She introduced herself, her people, and their stake in the fight by naming
interconnected bodies of water: "We are at the headwaters of Chilko, which is one
of the largest wild salmon runs, that is also part of the Taseko, that drains into the
Chilko, the Chilko into the Chilcotin, and into the Fraser. It's common sense for
all of our people to join together."

The point of drawing this liquid map was clear to all present: of course all of
these different nations and groups would join together to fight the threat of an oil
spill — they are all already united by water; by the lakes and rivers, streams and
oceans that drain into one another. And in British Columbia, the living connection
among all of these waterways is the salmon, that remarkably versatile traveler,
which moves through fresh- and saltwater and back again during its life cycle.
That's why the declaration that was being signed was not called the "Stop the
Tankers and Pipelines Declaration" but rather the "Save the Fraser Declaration" —
the Fraser, at almost 1,400 kilometers, being the longest river in B.C. and home to
its most productive salmon fishery. As the declaration states: "A threat to the
Fraser and its headwaters is a threat to all who depend on its health. We will not
allow our fish, animals, plants, people, and ways of life to be placed at risk.. . . We
will not allow the proposed Enbridge Northern Gateway Pipelines, or similar Tar
Sands projects, to cross our lands, territories and watersheds, or the ocean
migration routes of Fraser River salmon."

If the tar sands pipeline threatens to become an artery of death, carrying poison
across an estimated one thousand waterways, then these interconnected bodies of
water that Chief Baptiste was mapping are arteries of life, flowing together to bind

all of these disparate communities in common purpose.

The duty to protect water doesn't just unite opposition to this one pipeline; it is
the animating force behind every single movement fighting extreme extraction.
Whether deepwater drilling, fracking, or mining; whether pipelines, big rigs, or
export terminals, communities are terrified about what these activities will do to
their water systems. This fear is what binds together the southeastern Montana
cattle ranchers with the Northern Cheyenne with the Washington State
communities fighting coal trains and export terminals. Fear of contaminated
drinking water is what kick-started the anti-fracking movement (and when a
proposal surfaced that would allow the drilling of roughly twenty thousand

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fracking wells in the Delaware River Basin — the source of freshwater for fifteen
million Americans — it is what kicked the movement squarely into the U.S.
mainstream).

The movement against Keystone XL would, similarly, never have resonated as
powerfully as it did had TransCanada not made the inflammatory decision to route
the pipeline through the Ogallala Aquifer — a vast underground source of
freshwater beneath the Great Plains that provides drinking water to approximately
two million people and supplies roughly 30 percent of the country's irrigation
groundwater. 1 ^

In addition to the contamination threats, almost all these extractive projects also
stand out simply for how much water they require. For instance, it takes 2.3 barrels
of water to produce a single barrel of oil from tar sands mining — much more than
the 0.1 to 0.3 barrels of water needed for each barrel of conventional crude. Which
is why the tar sands mines and upgrading plants are surrounded by those giant
tailings "ponds" visible from space. Fracking for both shale gas and "tight oil"
similarly requires far more water than conventional drilling and is much more
water-intensive than the fracking methods used in the 1990s. According to a 2012
study, modern fracking "events" (as they are called) use an average of five million
gallons of water — "70 to 300 times the amount of fluid used in traditional
fracking." Once used, much of this water is radioactive and toxic. In 2012, the
industry created 280 billion gallons of such wastewater in the U.S. alone —
"enough to flood all of Washington DC beneath a 22ft deep toxic lagoon," as The
Guardian noted ~

In other words, extreme energy demands that we destroy a whole lot of the
essential substance we need to survive — water — just to keep extracting more of
the very substances threatening our survival and that we can power our lives
without.

This is coming, moreover, at a time when freshwater sources are imperiled
around the world. Indeed, the water used in extraction operations often comes from
aquifers that are already depleted from years of serial droughts, as is the case in
southern California, where prospectors are eyeing the enormous Monterey Shale,
and in Texas, where fracking has skyrocketed in recent years. Meanwhile, the
Karoo — an arid and spectacular region of South Africa that Shell is planning to
frack — literally translates as "land of the great thirst." Which helps explain why
Oom Johannes Willemse, a local spiritual leader, says, "Water is so holy. If you
don't have water, you don't have anything worth living for." He adds, "I will fight

to the death. I won't allow this water to be destroyed."

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The fight against pollution and climate change can seem abstract at times; but
wherever they live, people will fight for their water. Even die for it.

"Can we live without water?" the anti-fracking farmers chant in Pungesti,
Romania.

"No!"

"Can we live without Chevron?"
"Yes!"-

These truths emerge not out of an abstract theory about "the commons" but out
of lived experience. Growing in strength and connecting communities in all parts
of the world, they speak to something deep and unsettled in many of us. We know
that we are trapped within an economic system that has it backward; it behaves as
if there is no end to what is actually finite (clean water, fossil fuels, and the
atmospheric space to absorb their emissions) while insisting that there are strict
and immovable limits to what is actually quite flexible: the financial resources that
human institutions manufacture, and that, if imagined differently, could build the
kind of caring society we need. Anni Vassiliou, a youth worker who is part of the
struggle against the Eldorado gold mine in Greece, describes this as living in "an
upside down world. We are in danger of more and more floods. We are in danger
of never, here in Greece, never experiencing spring and fall again. And they're
telling us that we are in danger of exiting the Euro. How crazy is that?"^ Put
another way, a broken bank is a crisis we can fix; a broken Arctic we cannot.

Early Wins

It's not yet clear which side will win many of the struggles outlined in these
pages — only that the companies in the crosshairs are up against far more than they
bargained for. There have, however, already been some solid victories, too many
to fully catalogue here.

For instance, activists have won fracking bans or moratoria in dozens of cities
and towns and in much larger territories too. Alongside France, countries with
moratoria include Bulgaria, the Netherlands, the Czech Republic, and South Africa
(though South Africa has since lifted the ban). Moratoria or bans are also in place
in the states and provinces of Vermont, Quebec, as well as Newfoundland and
Labrador (as of early 2014, New York's contentious moratorium still held but it
looked shaky). This track record is all the more remarkable considering that so
much local anti-fracking activism has not received foundation funding, and is

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instead financed the old-fashioned way: by passing the hat at community events
and with countless volunteer hours.

And some victories against fossil fuel extraction receive almost no media
attention, but are significant nonetheless. Like the fact that in 2010 Costa Rica
passed a landmark law banning new open-pit mining projects anywhere in the
country. Or that in 2012, the residents of the Colombian archipelago of San
Andres, Providencia, and Santa Catalina successfully fended off government plans
to open the waters around their beautiful islands to offshore oil drilling. The region
is home to one of the largest coral reefs in the Western Hemisphere and as one
account of the victory puts it, what was established was the fact that coral is "more

*24

important than oil."

And then there is the wave of global victories against coal. Under mounting
pressure, the World Bank as well as other large international funders have
announced that they will no longer offer financing to coal projects except in
exceptional circumstances, which could turn out to be a severe blow to the industry
if other financiers follow suit. In Gerze, Turkey, a major proposed coal plant on
the Black Sea was scuttled under community pressure. The Sierra Club's hugely
successful "Beyond Coal" campaign has, along with dozens of local partner
organizations, succeeded in retiring 170 coal plants in the United States and

prevented over 180 proposed plants since 2002.

The campaign to block coal export terminals in the Pacific Northwest has
similarly moved from strength to strength. Three of the planned terminals — one
near Clatskanie, Oregon, another in Coos Bay, Oregon, and another in Hoquiam,
Washington — have already been nixed, the result of forceful community activism,
much of it organized by the Power Past Coal coalition. Several port proposals are
still pending but resistance is fierce, particularly to the largest of the bunch, just
outside Bellingham, Washington. "It's not a fun time to be in the coal industry
these days," said Nick Carter, president and chief operating officer of the U.S. coal
company Natural Resource Partners. "It's not much fun to get up every day, go to

work and spend your time fighting your own government."

In comparison, the actions against the various tar sands pipelines have not yet
won any clear victories, only a series of very long delays. But those delays matter
a great deal because they have placed a question mark over the capacity of
Alberta's oil patch to make good on its growth projections. And if there is one
thing billion-dollar investors hate, it' s political uncertainty. If Alberta' s landlocked
oil patch can't guarantee its investors a reliable route to the sea where bitumen can
be loaded onto tankers, then, as the province's former minister of energy Ron

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Liepert put it, "the investment is going to dry up." The head of one of the largest
oil companies in the tar sands confirmed this in January 2014. "If there were no
more pipeline expansions, I would have to slow down," Cenovus CEO Brian
Ferguson said. He clearly considered this some kind of threat, but from a climate

perspective it sounded like the best news in years.

Even if these tactics succeed only in slowing expansion plans, the delays will
buy time for clean energy sources to increase their market share and to be seen as
more viable alternatives, weakening the power of the fossil fuel lobby. And, even
more significantly, the delays give residents of the largest markets in Asia a
window of opportunity to strengthen their own demands for a clean energy
revolution.

Already, these demands are spreading so rapidly that it isn't at all clear how long
the market for new coal-fired plants and extra-dirty gasoline in Asia will continue
to expand. In India, Blockadia-style uprisings have been on full display in recent
years, with people's movements against coal-fired power plants significantly
slowing the rush to dirty energy in some regions. The southeastern state of Andhra
Pradesh has been the site of several iconic struggles, like one in the village of
Kakarapalli, surrounded by rice patties and coconut groves, where local residents
can be seen staffing a semipermanent checkpoint under a baobab tree at the
entrance to town. The encampment chokes off the only road leading to a half-built
power plant where construction was halted amidst protests in 2011. In nearby
Sompeta, another power plant proposal was stopped by a breakthrough alliance of
urban middle-class professionals and subsistence farmers and fishers who united
to protect the nearby wetlands. After police charged a crowd of protesters in 2010,
shooting dead at least two people, a national uproar forced the National

Environment Appellate Authority to revoke the permit for the project. The
community remains vigilant, with a daily rotating hunger strike entering its 1,500th
day at the beginning of 2014.

China, meanwhile, is in the midst of a very public and emotional debate about
its crisis levels of urban air pollution, in large part the result of the country's
massive reliance on coal. There have been surprisingly large and militant protests
against the construction of new coal-fired plants, most spectacularly in Haimen, a
small city in Guangdong Province. In December 201 1, as many as thirty thousand
residents surrounded a government building and blocked a highway to protest
plans to expand a coal-fired power plant. Citing concerns about cancer and other
health problems blamed on the existing plant, the demonstrators withstood days of
attacks by police, including tear gas and reported beatings with batons. They were

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there to send the message, as one protester put it, that, "This is going to affect our

future generations. They still need to live." The plant expansion was suspended.

Chinese peasants who rely on traditional subsistence activities like agriculture
and fishing have a history of militant uprisings against industrial projects that cause
displacement and disease, whether toxic factories, highways, or mega-dams. Very
often these actions attract severe state repression, including deaths in custody of
protest leaders. The projects usually go ahead regardless of the opposition, though
there have been some notable successes.

What has changed in China in recent years — and what is of paramount concern
to the ruling party — is that the country's elites, the wealthy winners in China's
embrace of full-throttle capitalism, are increasingly distressed by the costs of
industrialization. Indeed, Li Bo, who heads Friends of Nature, the oldest
environmental organization in China, describes urban air pollution as "a superman
for Chinese environment issues," laughing at the irony of an environmentalist
having "to thank smog." The reason, he explains, is that the elites had been able to
insulate themselves from previous environmental threats, like baby milk and water
contamination, because "the rich, the powerful, have special channels of delivery,
safer products [delivered] to their doorsteps." But no matter how rich you are, there
is no way to hide from the "blanket" of toxic air. "Nobody can do anything for

special [air] delivery," he says. "And that's the beauty of it."

To put the health crisis in perspective, the World Health Organization sets the
guideline for the safe presence of fine particles of dangerous air pollutants (known
as PM25) at 25 micrograms or less per cubic meter; 250 is considered hazardous by
the U.S. government. In January 2014, in Beijing, levels of these carcinogens hit
671. The ubiquitous paper masks haven't been enough to prevent outbreaks of
respiratory illness, or to protect children as young as eight from being diagnosed
with lung cancer. Shanghai, meanwhile, has introduced an emergency protocol in
which kindergartens and elementary schools are automatically shut down and all
large-scale outdoor gatherings like concerts and soccer games are canceled when
the levels of particulate matter in the air top 450 micrograms per cubic meter. No
wonder Chen Jiping, a former senior Communist Party official, now retired,
admitted in March 2013 that pollution is now the single greatest cause of social

unrest in the country, even more than land disputes.

China's unelected leaders have long since deflected demands for democracy and
human rights by touting the ruling party's record of delivering galloping economic
growth. As Li Bo puts it, the rhetoric was always, "We get rich first, we deal with

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the environment problems second." That worked for a long time, but now, he says,
"their argument has all of a sudden suffocated in the smog."

The pressure for a more sustainable development path has forced the
government to cut its targeted growth to a rate lower than China had experienced
in more than a decade, and to launch huge alternative energy programs. Many
dirty-energy projects, meanwhile, have been canceled or delayed. In 2011, a third
of the Chinese coal-fired power plants that had been approved for construction
"were stalled and investments in new coal plants weren't even half the level they
were in 2005," according to Justin Guay, associate director of the Sierra Club's
International Climate Program. "Even better, China actually closed down over 80
gigawatts of coal plants between 2001 — 2010 and is planning to phase out another
20 GW. To put that in perspective that's roughly the size of all electricity sources
in Spain, home to the world's 1 1th largest electricity sector." (In an effort to reduce
smog, the government is also exploring the potential for natural gas fracking, but
in an earthquake-prone country with severe water shortages, it's a plan unlikely to
quell unrest.)

All this pushback from within China is of huge significance to the broader fossil-
fuel resistance, from Australia to North America. It means that if tar sands
pipelines and coal export terminals can be held off for just a few more years, the
market for the dirty products the coal and oil companies are trying to ship to Asia
could well dry up. Something of a turning point took place in July 2013 when the
multinational investment banking firm Goldman Sachs published a research paper
titled, "The Window for Thermal Coal Investment Is Closing." Less than six
months later, Goldman Sachs sold its 49 percent stake in the company that is
developing the largest of the proposed coal export terminals, the one near
Bellingham, Washington, having apparently concluded that window had already

closed."

These victories add up: they have kept uncountable millions of tons of carbon
and other greenhouse gases out of the atmosphere. Whether or not climate change
has been a primary motivator, the local movements behind them deserve to be
recognized as unsung carbon keepers, who, by protecting their beloved forests,
mountains, rivers, and coastlines, are helping to protect all of us.

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Fossil Free: The Divestment Movement

Climate activists are under no illusion that shutting down coal plants, blocking tar
sands pipelines, and passing tracking bans will be enough to lower emissions as
rapidly and deeply as science demands. There are just too many extraction
operations already up and running and too many more being pushed
simultaneously. And oil multinationals are hyper-mobile — they move wherever
they can dig.

With this in mind, discussions are under way to turn the "no new fossil frontiers"
principle behind these campaigns into international law. Proposals include a
Europe- wide ban on fracking (in 2012, more than a third of the 766 members of

the European Parliament cast votes in favor of an immediate moratorium). There
is a growing campaign calling for a worldwide ban on offshore drilling in the
sensitive Arctic region, as well as in the Amazon rainforest. And activists are
similarly beginning to push for a global moratorium on tar sands extraction
anywhere in the world, on the grounds that it is sufficiently carbon-intensive to
merit transnational action.

Another tactic spreading with startling speed is the call for public interest
institutions like colleges, faith organizations, and municipal governments to sell
whatever financial holdings they have in fossil companies. The divestment
movement emerged organically out of various Blockadia- style attempts to block
carbon extraction at its source — specifically, out of the movement against
mountaintop removal coal mining in Appalachia, which was looking for a tactic to
put pressure on coal companies that had made it clear that they were indifferent to
local opinion. Those local activists were later joined by a national and then
international campaign spearheaded by 350.org, which extended the divestment
call to include all fossil fuels, not just coal. The idea behind the tactic was to target
not just individual unpopular projects but the logic that is driving this entire wave
of frenetic, high-risk extraction.

The divestment campaign is based on the idea — outlined so compellingly by Bill
McKibben — that anyone with a basic grasp of arithmetic can look at how much
carbon the fossil fuel companies have in their reserves, subtract how much carbon
scientists tell us we can emit and still keep global warming below 2 degrees
Celsius, and conclude that the fossil fuelcompanies have every intention of pushing
the planet beyond the boiling point.

These simple facts have allowed the student-led divestment movement to put the
fossil fuel companies' core business model on trial, arguing that they have become
rogue actors whose continued economic viability relies on radical climate

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destabilization — and that, as such, any institution claiming to serve the public
interest has a moral responsibility to liberate itself from these odious profits. "What
the fossil fuel divestment movement is saying to companies is your fundamental
business model of extracting and burning carbon is going to create an
uninhabitable planet. So you need to stop. You need a new business model,"

explains Chloe Maxmin, coordinator of Divest Harvard. And young people have
a special moral authority in making this argument to their school administrators:
these are the institutions entrusted to prepare them for the future; so it is the height
of hypocrisy for those same institutions to profit from an industry that has declared
war on the future at the most elemental level.

No tactic in the climate wars has resonated more powerfully. Within six months
of the campaign's official launch in November 2012, there were active divestment
campaigns on over three hundred campuses and in more than one hundred U.S.
cities, states, and religious institutions. The demand soon spread to Canada,
Australia, the Netherlands, and Britain. At the time of publication, thirteen U.S.
colleges and universities had announced their intention to divest their endowments
of fossil fuel stocks and bonds, and the leaders of more than twenty-five North
American cities had made similar commitments, including San Francisco and
Seattle. Around forty religious institutions had done the same. The biggest victory
to date came in May 2014 when Stanford University — with a huge endowment

worth $18.7 billion — announced it would be selling its coal stocks.^

Critics have been quick to point out that divestment won't bankrupt Exxon; if
Harvard, with its nearly $33 billion endowment, sells its stock, someone else will
snap it up. But this misses the power of the strategy: every time students,
professors, and faith leaders make the case for divestment, they are chipping away
at the social license with which these companies operate. As Sara Blazevic, a
divestment organizer at Swarthmore College, puts it, the movement is "taking
away the hold that the fossil fuel industry has over our political system by making
it socially unacceptable and morally unacceptable to be financing fossil fuel
extraction." And Cameron Fenton, one of the leaders of the divestment push in
Canada, adds, "No one is thinking we're going to bankrupt fossil fuel companies.
But what we can do is bankrupt their reputations and take away their political

power."

The eventual goal is to confer on oil companies the same status as tobacco
companies, which would make it much easier to make other important demands —
like bans on political donations from fossil fuel companies and on fossil fuel
advertising on television (for the same public health reasons that we ban broadcast

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cigarette ads). Crucially, it might even create the space for a serious discussion
about whether these profits are so illegitimate that they deserve to be appropriated
and reinvested in solutions to the climate crisis. Divestment is just the first stage
of this delegitimization process, but it is already well under way.

None of this is a replacement for major policy changes that would regulate
carbon reduction across the board. But what the emergence of this networked,
grassroots movement means is that the next time climate campaigners get into a
room filled with politicians and polluters to negotiate, there will be many
thousands of people outside the doors with the power to amp up the political
pressure significantly — with heightened boycotts, court cases, and more militant
direct action should real progress fail to materialize. And that is a very significant
shift indeed.

Already, the rise of Blockadia and the fossil fuel divestment movement is having
a huge impact on the mainstream environmental community, particularly the Big
Green groups that had entered into partnerships with fossil fuel companies (never
mind The Nature Conservancy, with its own Texas oil and gas operation . . .). Not
surprisingly, some of the big pro-corporate green groups view this new militancy
as an unwelcome intrusion on their territory. When it comes to fracking in
particular, groups like the Environmental Defense Fund have pointedly not joined
grassroots calls for drilling bans and a rapid shift to 100 percent renewables, but
have instead positioned themselves as brokers, offering up "best practices" —
developed with industry groups — that will supposedly address local environmental
concerns. (Even when locals make it abundantly clear that the only best practice
they are interested in is an unequivocal ban on fracking.) "We fear that those who
oppose all natural gas production everywhere are, in effect, making it harder for
the U.S. economy to wean itself from dirty coal," charged EDF chief counsel Mark

Brownstein.

Predictably, these actions have provoked enormous tensions, with grassroots
activists accusing the EDF of providing cover for polluters and undercutting their

*39

efforts.

But not all the Big Greens are reacting this way. Some — like Food & Water
Watch, 350.org, Greenpeace, Rainforest Action Network, and Friends of the
Earth — have been a central part of this new wave of anti-fossil fuel activism from
the beginning. And for others that were more ambivalent, the rapid spread of a
new, take-no-prisoners climate movement appears to have been a wake-up call; a
reminder that they had strayed too far from first principles. This shift has perhaps
been clearest at the Sierra Club, which, under the leadership of its former executive

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director, Carl Pope, had attracted considerable controversy with such corporate-
friendly actions as lending its logo to a line of "green" cleaning products owned
by Clorox. Most damaging, Pope had been an enthusiastic supporter of natural gas
and had appeared publicly (even lobbying on Capitol Hill) to sing the praises of
the fossil fuel alongside Aubrey McClendon, then CEO of Chesapeake Energy —
a company at the forefront of the hydraulic tracking explosion. Many local
chapters, neck deep in battles against fracking, had been livid. And it would later
emerge that the Sierra Club was, in this same period, secretly receiving many
millions in donations from Chesapeake — one of the biggest controversies to hit the
movement in decades.

A great deal has changed at the organization in the years since. The Sierra Club' s
new executive director, Michael Brune, put an end to the secret arrangement with
Chesapeake and canceled the Clorox deal. (Though the money was replaced with
a huge donation from Michael Bloomberg's foundation, which — though this was
not known at the time — is significantly invested in oil and natural gas.) Brune was
also arrested outside the White House in a protest against the construction of
Keystone XL tar sands pipeline, breaking the organization's longtime ban on
engaging in civil disobedience. Perhaps most significantly, the Sierra Club has
joined the divestment movement. It now has a clear policy against investing in, or

taking money from, fossil fuel companies and affiliated organizations.

In April 2014, the Natural Resources Defense Council announced that it had
helped create "the first equity global index tool that will exclude companies linked
to exploration, ownership or extraction of carbon-based fossil fuel reserves. This
new investment tool will allow investors who claim to be socially conscious,
including foundations, universities, and certain pension groups, to align their
investments with their missions." The rigor of this new tool remains to be tested
(and I have my doubts) but it represents a shift from a year earlier, when the NRDC
admitted that its own portfolio was invested in mutual funds and other mixed assets

that did not screen for fossil fuels.

The divestment movement is even (slowly) being embraced by some of the
foundations that finance environmental activism. In January 2014, seventeen
foundations pledged to divest from fossil fuels and invest in clean energy. While
none of the Big Green donors — the Hewlett and Packard Foundations or the
Walton Family Foundation, for example, not to mention Ford or Bloomberg —
were on board, several smaller ones were, including the Wallace Global Fund and

the Park Foundation, both major funders of anti-fossil fuel activism.

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Up until quite recently, there was a widely shared belief that the big oil companies
had such a fail-safe profit-making formula that none of this — not the divestment
campaigns, not the on-the-ground resistance — would make any kind of dent in
their power and wealth. That attitude needed some readjusting in January 2014
when Shell — which raked in more revenue than any company in the world in
2013 — announced fourth-quarter profits that blindsided investors. Rather than the
previous year's $5.6 billion quarter, Shell's new CEO, Ben van Beurden,
announced that the company was now expecting just $2.9 billion, a jarring 48

percent drop.

No single event could take the credit, but the company's various troubles were
clearly adding up: its Arctic misadventures, the uncertainty in the tar sands, the
persistent political unrest in Nigeria, and the growing chatter about a "carbon
bubble" inflating its stock. Reacting to the news, the financial research company
Sanford C. Bernstein & Co. noted that the plummet was "highly unusual for an

integrated oil company" and admitted that it was "a bit shellshocked."

The Democracy Crisis

As the anti-fossil fuel forces gain strength, extractive companies are beginning to
fight back using a familiar tool: the investor protection provisions of free trade
agreements. As previously mentioned, after the province of Quebec successfully
banned fracking, the U.S. -incorporated oil and gas company Lone Pine Resources
announced plans to sue Canada for at least $230 million under the North American
Free Trade Agreement's rules on expropriation and "fair and equitable treatment."
In arbitration documents, Lone Pine complained that the moratorium imposed by
a democratically elected government amounted to an "arbitrary, capricious, and
illegal revocation of the Enterprise's valuable right to mine for oil and gas under
the St. Lawrence River." It also claimed (rather incredibly) that this occurred "with
no cognizable public purpose" — not to mention "without a penny of
compensation." 4 ^

It's easy to imagine similar challenges coming from any company whose
extractive dreams are interrupted by a democratic uprising. And indeed after the
Keystone XL pipeline was delayed yet again in April 2014, Canadian and
TransCanada officials began hinting of a possible challenge to the U.S.
government under NAFTA.

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In fact, current trade and investment rules provide legal grounds for foreign
corporations to fight virtually any attempt by governments to restrict the
exploitation of fossil fuels, particularly once a carbon deposit has attracted
investment and extraction has begun. And when the aim of the investment is
explicitly to export the oil, gas, and coal and sell it on the world market — as is
increasingly the case — successful campaigns to block those exports could well be
met with similar legal challenges, since imposing "quantitative restrictions" on the

free flow of goods across borders violates a fundamental tenet of trade law.

"I really do think in order to combat the climate crisis, fundamentally we need
to strip the power out of the fossil fuel industry, which raises enormous investment
challenges in the trade context," says liana Solomon, the Sierra Club's trade expert.
"As we begin to regulate the fossil fuel industry, for example in the United States,
the industry may increasingly respond by seeking to export raw materials, whether
it's coal, or natural gas, and under trade law it is literally illegal to stop the exports

of those resources once they're mined. So it's very hard to stop."

It is unsurprising, then, that as Blockadia victories mount, so do the corporate
trade challenges. More investment disputes are being filed than ever before, with
a great many initiated by fossil fuel companies — as of 2013, a full sixty out of 169
pending cases at the World Bank's dispute settlement tribunal had to do with the
oil and gas or mining sectors, compared to a mere seven extraction cases
throughout the entire 1980s and 1990s. According to Lori Wallach, director of
Public Citizen's Global Trade Watch, of the more than $3 billion in compensation
already awarded under U.S. free trade agreements and bilateral investment treaties,
more than 85 percent "pertains to challenges against natural resource, energy, and

environmental policies."

None of this should be surprising. Of course the richest and most powerful
companies in the world will exploit the law to try to stamp out real and perceived
threats and to lock in their ability to dig and drill wherever they wish in the world.
And it certainly doesn't help that many of our governments seem determined to
hand out even more lethal legal weapons in the form of new and expanded trade
deals, which companies, in turn, will use against governments' own domestic laws.

There may, however, be an unexpected upside to the aggressive use of trade law
to quash environmental wins: after a decade lull when few seemed to be paying
attention to the arcane world of free trade negotiations, a new generation of
activists is once again becoming attuned to the democratic threat these treaties
represent. Indeed there is now more public scrutiny and debate about trade
agreements than there has been in years.

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The point of this scrutiny, however, should not be to throw up our hands in the
face of yet another obstacle standing in the way of sensible action on climate.
Because while it is true that the international legal architecture of corporate rights
is both daunting and insidious, the well-kept secret behind these deals is that they
are only as powerful as our governments allow them to be. They are filled with
loopholes and workarounds so any government that is serious about adopting
climate polices that reduce emissions in line with science could certainly find a
way to do so, whether by aggressively challenging trade rulings that side with
polluters, or finding creative policy tweaks to get around them, or refusing to abide
by rulings and daring reprisals (since these institutions cannot actually force
governments to change laws), or attempting to renegotiate the rules. Put another
way, the real problem is not that trade deals are allowing fossil fuel companies to
challenge governments, it's that governments are not fighting back against these
corporate challenges. And that has far less to do with any individual trade
agreement than it does with the profoundly corrupted state of our political systems.

Beyond Fossilized Democracies

The process of taking on the corporate- state power nexus that underpins the
extractive economy is leading a great many people to face up to the underlying
democratic crisis that has allowed multinationals to be the authors of the laws
under which they operate — whether at the municipal, state/provincial, national, or
international level. It is this corroded state of our political systems — as fossilized
as the fuel at the center of these battles — that is fast turning Blockadia into a
grassroots pro-democracy movement.

Having the ability to defend one' s community' s water source from danger seems
to a great many people like the very essence of self-determination. What is
democracy if it doesn't encompass the capacity to decide, collectively, to protect
something that no one can live without?

The insistence on this right to have a say in critical decisions relating to water,
land, and air is the thread that runs through Blockadia. It's a sentiment summed up
well by Helen Slottje, a former corporate lawyer who has helped around 170 New
York towns to adopt anti-fracking ordinances: "Are you kidding me? You think
you can just come into my town and tell me you're going to do whatever you want,
wherever you want, whenever you want it, and I'm going to have no say? Who do
you think you are?" I heard much the same from Marily Papanikolaou, a wavy-

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haired Greek mountain-bike guide who had been perfectly happy raising her
toddlers and leading tourists through forest trails, but now spends her spare time at
anti-mine demonstrations and meetings. "I can't let anyone come in my village and
try to do this and not ask me for my permission, /live here!" And you can hear
something awfully similar from Texas landowners, irate that a Canadian pipeline
company tried to use the law of eminent domain to gain access to their family land.
"I just don't believe that a Canadian organization that appears to be building a
pipeline for their financial gain has more right to my land than I do," said Julia
Trigg Crawford, who has challenged TransCanada in court over its attempt to use
her 650-acre ranch near Paris, Texas, which her grandfather purchased in 1948.~
And yet the most jarring part of the grassroots anti-extraction uprising has been
the rude realization that most communities do appear to lack this power; that
outside forces — a far-off central government, working hand-in-glove with
transnational companies — are simply imposing enormous health and safety risks
on residents, even when that means overturning local laws. Fracking, tar sands
pipelines, coal trains, and export terminals are being proposed in many parts of the
world where a clear majority of the population has made its opposition
unmistakable, at the ballot box, through official consultation processes, and in the
streets.

And yet consent seems beside the point. Again and again, after failing to
persuade communities that these projects are in their genuine best interest,
governments are teaming up with corporate players to roll over the opposition,
using a combination of physical violence and draconian legal tools reclassifying

*51

peaceful activists as terrorists.

Nongovernmental organizations of all kinds find themselves under increasing
surveillance, both by security forces and by corporations, often working in tandem.
Pennsylvania's Office of Homeland Security hired a private contractor to gather
intelligence on anti-fracking groups, which it proceeded to share with major shale
gas companies. The same phenomenon is unfolding in France, where the utility
EDF was convicted in 2011 of unlawfully spying on Greenpeace. In Canada,
meanwhile, it was revealed that Chuck Strahl, then chair of the committee
overseeing the country's spy agency, the Canadian Security Intelligence Service,
was registered as a lobbyist for Enbridge, the company behind the hugely
controversial Northern Gateway tar sands pipeline. That was a problem because
the National Energy Board had directed the agency to assess the security threats to
pipeline projects, which was thinly veiled code for spying on environmentalists
and First Nations.^

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Strahl's dual role raised the question of whether Enbridge could also gain access
to the information gleaned. Then it came out that Strahl wasn't the only one who
seemed to be working for the government and the fossil fuel companies
simultaneously. As the CBC reported, "Half of the other Harper government
appointees keeping an eye on the spies also have ties to the oil business" —
including one member who sits on the board of Enbridge Gas NB, a wholly owned
regional subsidiary of the pipeline company, and another who had been on

TransCanada's board. Strahl resigned amid the controversy; the others did not."

The collusion between corporations and the state has been so boorishly defiant
that it's almost as if the communities standing in the way of these projects are
viewed as little more than "overburden" — that ugliest of words used by the
extractive industries to describe the "waste earth" that must be removed to access
a tar sands or mineral deposit. Like the trees, soil, rocks, and clay that the industry's
machines scrape up, masticate, and pile into great slag heaps, democracy is getting
torn into rubble too, chewed up and tossed aside to make way for the bulldozers.

That was certainly the message when the three-person Joint Review Panel that
had been so scared by the Heiltsuk community's welcome in Bella Bella finally
handed down its recommendation to Canada's federal government. The Northern
Gateway pipeline should go ahead, the panel announced. And though it
enumerated 209 conditions that should be met before construction — from
submiting caribou habitat protection plans to producing an updated inventory of
waterway crossings "in both Adobe PDF and Microsoft Excel spreadsheet

formats" — the ruling was almost universally interpreted as a political green light.

Only two out of the over one thousand people who spoke at the panel's
community hearings in British Columbia supported the project. One poll showed
that 80 percent of the province's residents opposed having more oil tankers along
their marine-rich coastline. That a supposedly impartial review body could rule in
favor of the pipeline in the face of this kind of overwhelming opposition was seen
by many in Canada as clear evidence of a serious underlying crisis, one far more
about money and power than the environment. "Sadly, today's results are exactly
what we expected," said anti-pipeline campaigner Torrance Coste, "proof that our
democratic system is broken. "~

In a sense, these are merely local manifestations of the global democratic crisis
represented by climate change itself. As Venezuelan political scientist Edgardo
Lander aptly puts it, "The total failure of climate negotiation serves to highlight
the extent to which we now live in a post-democratic society. The interests of
financial capital and the oil industry are much more important than the democratic

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will of people around the world. In the global neoliberal society profit is more
important than life." Or, as George Monbiot, The Guardian's indispensable
environmental columnist, put it on the twenty-year anniversary of the Rio Earth
Summit, "Was it too much to have asked of the world's governments, which
performed such miracles in developing stealth bombers and drone warfare, global
markets and trillion-dollar bailouts, that they might spend a tenth of the energy and
resources they devoted to these projects on defending our living planet? It seems,
sadly, that it was." Indeed, the failure of our political leaders to even attempt to
ensure a safe future for us represents a crisis of legitimacy of almost unfathomable
proportions.

And yet a great many people have reacted to this crisis not by abandoning the
promise of genuine self-government, but rather by attempting to make good on
that promise in the spheres where they still have real influence. It's striking, for
instance, that even as national governments and international agencies fail us,
cities are leading the way on climate action around the world, from Bogota to
Vancouver. Smaller communities are also taking the lead in the democratic
preparation for a climate-changed future. This can be seen most clearly in the fast-
growing Transition Town movement. Started in 2006 in Totnes — an ancient
market town in Devon, England, with a bohemian reputation — the movement has
since spread to more than 460 locations in at least forty-three countries worldwide.
Each Transition Town (and this may be an actual town or a neighborhood in a
larger city) undertakes to design what the movement calls an "energy descent
action plan" — a collectively drafted blueprint for lowering its emissions and
weaning itself off fossil fuels. The process opens up rare spaces for participatory
democracy, with neighbors packing consultation meetings at city halls to share
ideas about everything from how to increase their food security through increased

local agriculture to building more efficient affordable housing.

Nor is it all dry planning meetings. In Totnes, the local Transition group
organizes frequent movie nights, public lectures, and discussions, as well as street
festivals to celebrate each landmark toward greater sustainability. This too is part
of responding to the climate crisis, as critical as having secure food supplies and
building sturdy seawalls. Because a key determinant in how any community
survives an extreme weather event is its connective tissue — the presence of small
local businesses and common spaces where neighbors can get to know one another
and make sure that elderly people aren't forgotten during crushing heat waves or
storms. As the environmental writer and analyst David Roberts has observed, "the
ingredients of resilience" are "overlapping social and civic circles, filled with

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people who, by virtue of living in close proximity and sharing common spaces,
know and take care of each other. The greatest danger in times of stress or threat
insolation. Finding ways of expanding public spaces and nurturing civic
involvement is not just some woolly-headed liberal project — it's a survival

„58

strategy.

The intimacy of local politics is also what has turned this tier of government into
an important site of resistance to the carbon extraction frenzy — whether it's cities
voting to take back control over a coal-burning utility that won't switch to
renewables (as so many citizens are doing in Germany), or municipalities adopting
policies to divest city holdings of fossil fuels, or towns passing anti-fracking
ordinances. And these are not mere symbolic expressions of dissent. Commenting
on the stakes of his client's court challenge to local anti-fracking ordinances,
Thomas West, a lawyer for Norse Energy Corporation USA, told The New York
Times, "It's going to decide the future of the oil and gas industry in the state of
New York."-

Local ordinances are not the only — or even the most powerful — unconventional
legal tools that may help Blockadia to extend its early victories. This became
apparent when the panel reviewing Enbridge's Northern Gateway pipeline
announced its recommendations. The news that it had greenlighted the federal
government to approve the much loathed tar sands project was not, for the most
part, greeted with despair. Instead, a great many Canadians remained convinced
that the pipeline would never go ahead and that the British Columbia coast would
be saved — no matter what the panel said or what the federal government did.

"The federal cabinet needs First Nations' approval and social license from
British Columbians, and they have neither," said Sierra Club BC campaigns
director Caitlyn Vernon. And referring to the Save the Fraser Declaration signed
by Chief Baptiste and so many others, she added, "First Nations have formally
banned pipelines and tankers from their territories on the basis of Indigenous
law." It was a sentiment echoed repeatedly in news reports: that the legal title of
the province's First Nations was so powerful that even if the federal government
did approve the pipeline (which it eventually did in June 2014), the project would
be successfully stopped in the courts through Indigenous legal challenges, as well
as in the forests through direct action.

Is it true? As the next chapter will explore, the historical claims being made by
Indigenous peoples around the world as well as by developing countries for an

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honoring of historical debts indeed have the potential to act as counterweights to
increasingly undemocratic and intransigent governments. But the outcome of this
power struggle is by no means certain. As always, it depends on what kind of
movement rallies behind these human rights and moral claims.

When a make-up hearing was scheduled by the Joint Review Panel months later, it was held in a
predominantly white community elsewhere in the province.

~ Sadly, this pristine UNESCO Biosphere Reserve is once again at risk after an international court ruling
declared the waters surrounding the Caribbean islands to be legally owned by the government of Nicaragua
(though the islands themselves remain part of Colombia). And Nicaragua has stated its intention to drill.

For instance, in May 2013, sixty-eight groups and individuals — including Friends of the Earth,
Greenpeace, and Robert Kennedy Jr. — signed a letter that directly criticized the EDF and and its president
Fred Krupp for their role in creating the industry-partnered Center for Sustainable Shale Development
(CSSD). "CSSD bills itself as a collaborative effort between 'diverse interests with a common goal,' but
our goals as a nation are not, and cannot, be the same as those of Chevron, Consol Energy, EQT
Corporation, and Shell, all partners in CSSD," the letter states. "These corporations are interested in
extracting as much shale gas and oil as possible, and at a low cost. We are interested in minimizing the
extraction and consumption of fossil fuels and in facilitating a rapid transition to the real sustainable energy
sources — the sun, the wind, and hydropower."

1 Reached by email, Carl Pope, who had not previously commented on the controversy, explained his
actions as follows: "Climate advocates were at war with the coal industry, and at that moment Chesapeake
was willing to ally with us. I understand the concerns of those who thought that alliance was a bad idea —
but it is likely that without it about 75 of the pending 150 new coal fired power plants we stopped would
have been built instead." He added, "What I do regret is the failure at the time to understand the scale and
form that the shale gas and oil revolution would take, which led us to make inadequate investments in
getting ready for the assault that would soon be coming at states like Pennsylvania, West Virginia and
Colorado. That was a significant, and costly, failure of vision."

~ This reached truly absurd levels in December 2013 when two twentysomething antifracking activists were
charged with staging a "terrorism hoax" after they unfurled cloth protest banners at the headquarters of
Devon Energy in Oklahoma City. Playing on the Hunger Games slogan, one of the banners said: "THE
ODDS ARE NEVER IN OUR FAVOR." Standard, even benign activist fare— except for one detail.
According to Oklahoma City Police captain Dexter Nelson, as the banner was lowered it shed a "black
powder substance" that was meant to mimic a "biochemical assault," as the police report put it. That
nefarious powder, the captain stated, was "later determined to be glitter." Never mind that the video of the
event showed absolutely no concern about the falling glitter from the assembled onlookers. "I could have
swept it up in two minutes if they gave me a broom," said Stefan Warner, one of those charged and facing
the prospect of up to ten years in jail.

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YOU AND WHAT ARMY?

Indigenous Rights and the Power of Keeping Our Word

"I never thought I would ever see the day that we would come together.
Relationships are changing, stereotypes are disappearing, there's more
respect for one another. If anything, this Enbridge Northern Gateway
has unified British Columbia."

— Geraldine Thomas-Flurer, coordinator of the Yinka Dene Alliance, a First
Nations coalition opposing the Enbridge Northern Gateway pipeline, 2013 1

"There is never peace in West Virginia because there is never justice."

— Labor organizer Mary Harris "Mother" Jones, 1925

The guy from Standard & Poor' s was leafing through the fat binder on the round
table in the meeting room, brow furrowed, skimming and nodding.

It was 2004 and I found myself sitting in on a private meeting between two
important First Nations leaders and a representative of one of the three most
powerful credit rating agencies in the world. The meeting had been requested by
Arthur Manuel, a former Neskonlith chief in the interior of British Columbia, now
spokesperson for the Indigenous Network on Economies and Trade.

Arthur Manuel, who comes from a long line of respected Native leaders, is an
internationally recognized thinker on the question of how to force belligerent
governments to respect Indigenous land rights, though you might not guess it from
his plainspoken manner or his tendency to chuckle mid- sentence. His theory is that
nothing will change until there is a crediblethreat that continuing to violate Native
rights will carry serious financial costs, whether for governments or investors. So
he has been looking for different ways to inflict those costs.

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That's why he had initiated a correspondence with Standard & Poor's, which
routinely blesses Canada with a AAA credit rating, a much coveted indicator to
investors that the country is a safe and secure place in which to sink their money.
In letters to the agency, Manuel had argued that Canada did not deserve such a
high rating because it was failing to report a very important liability: a massive
unpaid debt that takes the form of all the wealth that had been extracted from

unceded Indigenous land, without consent — since 1846. He further explained the
various Supreme Court cases that had affirmed that Aboriginal and Treaty Rights
were still very much alive.

After much back-and-forth, Manuel had managed to get a meeting with Joydeep
Mukherji, director of the Sovereign Ratings Group, and the man responsible for
issuing Canada's credit rating. The meeting took place at S&P's headquarters, a
towering building just off Wall Street. Manuel had invited Guujaaw, the
charismatic president of the Haida Nation, to help him make the case about those
unpaid debts, and at the last minute had asked me to come along as a witness.
Unaware that, post- 9/11, official ID is required to get into all major Manhattan
office buildings, the Haida leader had left his passport in his hotel room; dressed
in a short-sleeved checked shirt and with a long braid down his back, Guujaaw
almost didn't make it past security. But after some negotiation with security (and
intervention from Manuel's contact upstairs), we made it in.

At the meeting, Manuel presented the Okanagan writ of summons, and explained
that similar writs had been filed by many other First Nations. These simple
documents, asserting land title to large swaths of territory, put the Canadian
government on notice that these bands had every intention of taking legal action
to get the economic benefits of lands being used by resource companies without
their consent. These writs, Manuel explained, represented trillions of dollars'
worth of unacknowledged liability being carried by the Canadian state.

Guujaaw then solemnly presented Mukherji with the Haida Nation's registered
statement of claim, a seven-page legal document that had been filed before the
Supreme Court of British Columbia seeking damages and reparations from the
provincial government for unlawfully exploiting and degrading lands and waters
that are rightfully controlled by the Haida. Indeed, at that moment, the case was
being argued before the Supreme Court of Canada, challenging both the logging
giant Weyerhaeuser and the provincial government of British Columbia over a
failure to consult before logging the forests on the Pacific island of Haida Gwaii.
"Right now the Canadian and British Columbia governments are using our land
and our resources — Aboriginal and Treaty Rights — as collateral for all the loans

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they get from Wall Street," Manuel said. "We are in fact subsidizing the wealth of

Canada and British Columbia with our impoverishment."

Mukherji and an S&P colleague listened and silently skimmed Manuel's
documents. A polite question was asked about Canada's recent federal elections
and whether the new government was expected to change the enforcement of
Indigenous land rights. It was clear that none of this was new to them — not the
claims, not the court rulings, not the constitutional language. They did not dispute
any of the facts. But Mukherji explained as nicely as he possibly could that the
agency had come to the conclusion that Canada's First Nations did not have the
power to enforce their rights and therefore to collect on their enormous debts.
Which meant, from S&P's perspective, that those debts shouldn't affect Canada's
stellar credit rating. The company would, however, continue to monitor the
situation to see if the dynamics changed.

And with that we were back on the street, surrounded by New Yorkers clutching
iced lattes and barking into cell phones. Manuel snapped a few pictures of Guujaaw
underneath the Standard & Poor's sign, flanked by security guards in body armor.
The two men seemed undaunted by what had transpired; I, on the other hand, was
reeling. Because what the men from S&P were really saying to these two
representatives of my country's original inhabitants was: "We know you never
sold your land. But how are you going to make the Canadian government keep its
word? You and what army?"

At the time, there did not seem to be a good answer to that question. Indigenous
rights in North America did not have powerful forces marshaled behind them and
they had plenty of powerful forces standing in opposition. Not just government,
industry, and police, but also corporate-owned media that cast them as living in
the past and enjoying undeserved special rights, while those same media outlets
usually failed to do basic public education about the nature of the treaties our
governments (or rather their British predecessors) had signed. Even most
intelligent, progressive thinkers paid little heed: sure they supported Indigenous
rights in theory, but usually as part of the broader multicultural mosaic, not as
something they needed to actively defend.

However, in perhaps the most politically significant development of the rise of
Blockadia-style resistance, this dynamic is changing rapidly — and an army of sorts
is beginning to coalesce around the fight to turn Indigenous land rights into hard
economic realities that neither government nor industry can ignore.

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The Last Line of Defense

As we have seen, the exercise of Indigenous rights has played a central role in the
rise of the current wave of fossil fuel resistance. The Nez Perce were the ones who
were ultimately able to stop the big rigs on Highway 12 in Idaho and Montana; the
Northern Cheyenne continue to be the biggest barrier to coal development in
southeastern Montana; the Lummi present the greatest legal obstacle to the
construction of the biggest proposed coal export terminal in the Pacific Northwest;
the Elsipogtog First Nation managed to substantially interfere with seismic testing
for fracking in New Brunswick; and so on. Going back further, it's worth
remembering that the struggles of the Ogoni and Ijaw in Nigeria included a broad
demand for self-determination and resource control over land that both groups
claimed was illegitimately taken from them during the colonial formation of
Nigeria. In short, Indigenous land and treaty rights have proved a major barrier for
the extractive industries in many of the key Blockadia struggles.

And through these victories, a great many non-Natives are beginning to
understand that these rights represent some of the most robust tools available to
prevent ecological crisis. Even more critically, many non-Natives are also
beginning to see that the ways of life that Indigenous groups are protecting have a
great deal to teach about how to relate to the land in ways that are not purely
extractive. This represents a true sea change overa very short period of time. My
own country offers a glimpse into the speed of this shift.

The Canadian Constitution and the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms
acknowledge and offer protection to "aboriginal rights," including treaty rights,
the right to self-government, and the right to practice traditional culture and
customs. There was, however, a widespread perception among Canadians that
treaties represented agreements to fully surrender large portions of lands in
exchange for the provision of public services and designated rights on much
smaller reserves. Many Canadians also assumed that in the lands not covered by
any treaty (which is a great deal of the country, 80 percent of British Columbia
alone), non-Natives could pretty much do what they wished with the natural
resources. First Nations had rights on their reserves, but if they once had rights off
them as well, they had surely lost them by attrition over the years. Finders keepers
sort of thing, or so the thinking went.

All of this was turned upside down in the late 1990s when the Supreme Court of
Canada handed down a series of landmark decisions in cases designed to test the
limits of Aboriginal title and treaty rights. First came Delgamuukw v. British
Columbia in 1997, which ruled that in those large parts of B.C. that were not

THIS CHANGES EVERYTHING | 320

covered by any treaty, Aboriginal title over that land had never been extinguished
and still needed to be settled. This was interpreted by many First Nations as an
assertion that they still had full rights to that land, including the right to fish, hunt,
and gather there. Chelsea Vowel, a Montreal-based Metis educator and Indigenous
legal scholar, explains the Shockwave caused by the decision. "One day, Canadians
woke up to a legal reality in which millions of acres of land were recognized as
never having been acquired by the Crown," which would have "immediate
implications for other areas of the country where no treaties ceding land ownership
were ever signed."^

Two years later, in 1999, the ruling known as the Marshalldecision affirmed that
when the Mi'kmaq, Maliseet, and Passamaquoddy First Nations, largely based in
New Brunswick and Nova Scotia, signed "peace and friendship" treaties with the
British Crown in 1760 and 1761, they did not — as so many Canadians then
assumed — agree to give up rights to their ancestral lands. Rather they were
agreeing to share them with settlers on the condition that the First Nations could
continue to use those lands for traditional activities like fishing, trading, and
ceremony. The case was sparked by a single fisherman, Donald Marshall Jr.,
catching eels out of season and without a license; the court ruled that it was within
the rights of the Mi'kmaq and Maliseet to fish year-round enough to earn a
"moderate livelihood" where their ancestors had fished, exempting them from

many of the rules set by the federal government for the non-Native fishing fleet.

Many other North American treaties contained similar resource-sharing
provisions. Treaty 6, for instance, which covers large parts of the Alberta tar sands
region, contains clear language stating that "Indians, shall have right to pursue their
avocations of hunting and fishing throughout the tract surrendered" — in other
words, they surrendered only theirexclusive rights to the territory and agreed that
the land would be used by both parties, with settlers and Indigenous peoples
pursuing their interests in parallel ~

But any parallel, peaceful coexistence is plainly impossible if one party is
irrevocably altering and poisoning that shared land. And indeed, though it is not
written in the text of the treaty, First Nations elders living in this region contend
that Indigenous negotiators gave permission for the land to be used by settlers only
"to the depth of a plow" — considerably less than the cavernous holes being dug
there today. In the agreements that created modern-day North America such land-
sharing provisions form the basis of most major treaties.

In Canada, the period after the Supreme Court decisions was a tumultuous one.
Federal and provincial governments did little or nothing to protect the rights that

THIS CHANGES EVERYTHING | 321

the judges had affirmed, so it fell to Indigenous people to go out on the land and
water and assert them — to fish, hunt, log, and build ceremonial structures, often
without state permission. The backlash was swift. Across the country non-Native
fishers and hunters complained that the "Indians" were above the law, that they
were going to empty the oceans and rivers of fish, take all the good game, destroy
the woods, and on and on. (Never mind the uninterrupted record of reckless
resource mismanagement by all levels of the Canadian government.)

Tensions came to a head in the Mi'kmaq community of Burnt Church, New
Brunswick. Enraged that the Marshall decision had empowered Mi'kmaq people
to exercise their treaty rights and fish outside of government- approved seasons,
mobs of non-Native fishermen launched a series of violent attacks on their Native
neighbors. In what became known as the Burnt Church Crisis, thousands of
Mi'kmaq lobster traps were destroyed, three fish-processing plants were
ransacked, a ceremonial arbor was burned to the ground, and several Indigenous
people were hospitalized after their truck was attacked. And it wasn't just vigilante
violence. As the months-long crisis wore on, government boats staffed with
officials in riot gear rammed into Native fishing boats, sinking two vessels and
forcing their crews to jump to safety in the water. The Mi'kmaq fishers did their
best to defend themselves, with the help of the Mi'kmaq Warrior Society, but they
were vastly outnumbered and an atmosphere of fear prevailed for years. The racism
was so severe that at one point a non-Native fisherman put on a long-haired wig
and performed a cartoonish "war dance" on the deck of his boat in front of
delighted television crews.

That was 2000. In 2013, a little more than an hour's drive down the coast from
Burnt Church, the same Mi'kmaq Warrior Society was once again in the news, this
time because it had joined with the Elsipogtog First Nation to fend off the Texas
company at the center of the province's fracking showdown. But the mood and
underlying dynamics could not have been more different. This time, over months
of protest, the warriors helped to light a series of ceremonial sacred fires and
explicitly invited the non-Native community to join them on the barricades "to
ensure that the company cannot resume work to extract shale gas via fracking." A
statement explained, "This comes as part of a larger campaign that reunites
Indigenous, Acadian & Anglo people." (New Brunswick has a large French-
speaking Acadian population, with its own historical tensions with the English-

speaking majority.)

Many heeded the call and it was frequently noted that protests led by the
Elsipogtog First Nation were remarkably diverse, drawing participants from all of

THIS CHANGES EVERYTHING | 322

the province's ethnic groups, as well as from First Nations across the country. As
one non- Native participant, Debbi Hauper, told a video crew, "It's just a real sense
of togetherness. We are united in what is most important. And I think we're seeing
more and more of government and industries' methods of trying to separate us.

And let's face it, these methods have worked for decades. But I think we're waking

„io

up.

There were attempts to revive the old hatreds, to be sure. A police officer was
overheard saying "Crown land belongs to the government, not to fucking Natives."
And after the conflict with police turned violent, New Brunswick premier David
Alward observed, "Clearly, there are those who do not have the same values we
share as New Brunswickers." But the community stuck together and there were
solidarity protests in dozens of cities and towns across the country: "This is not
just a First Nations campaign. It's actually quite a historic moment where all the
major peoples of this province — English, French and Aboriginal — come together
for a common cause," said David Coon, head of the Green Party in New
Brunswick. "This is really a question of justice. They want to protect their common
lands, water and air from destruction."

By then many in the province had come to understand that the Mi'kmaq's rights
to use their traditional lands and waters to hunt and fish — the same rights that had
sparked race riots a dozen years earlier — represented the best hope for the majority

of New Brunswickers who opposed fracking. And new tools were clearly
required. Premier Alward had been a fracking skeptic before he was elected in
2010 but once in office, he promptly changed his tune, saying the revenue was
needed to pay for social programs and to create jobs — the sort of flip flop that
breeds cynicism about representative democracy the world over.

Indigenous rights, in contrast, are not dependent on the whims of politicians.
The position of the Elsipogtog First Nation was that no treaty gave the Canadian
government the authority to radically alter their ancestral lands. The right to hunt
and fish, affirmed by the Marshall decision, was violated by industrial activity that
threatened the fundamental health of the lands and waters (since what good is
having the right to fish, for instance, when the water is polluted?). Gary Simon of
the Elsipogtog First Nation explains, "I believe our treaties are the last line of

defense to save the clean water for future generations."

It's the same position the Lummi have taken against the coal export terminal
near Bellingham, Washington, arguing that the vast increase in tanker traffic in the
Strait of Georgia, as well as the polluting impacts of coal dust, violates their treaty-
protected right to fish those waters. (The Lower Elwha Klallam tribe in

THIS CHANGES EVERYTHING | 323

Washington State made similar points when its leaders fought to remove two dams
on the Elwha River. They argued, successfully, that by interfering with salmon
runs the dam violated their treaty rights to fish.) And when the U.S. State
Department indicated, in February 2014, that it might soon be offering its blessing
to the Keystone XL pipeline, members of the Lakota Nation immediately
announced that they considered the pipeline construction illegal. As Paula Antoine,
an employee of the Rosebud tribe's land office, explained, because the pipeline
passes through Lakota treaty-protected traditional territory, and very close to
reservation land, "They aren't recognizing our treaties, they are violating our treaty
rights and our boundaries by going through there. Any ground disturbance around

that proposed line will affect us."

These rights are real and they are powerful, all the more so because many of the
planet's largest and most dangerous unexploded carbon bombs lie beneath lands
and waters to which Indigenous peoples have legitimate legal claims. No one has
more legal power to halt the reckless expansion of the tar sands than the First
Nations living downstream whose treaty-protected hunting, fishing, and trapping
grounds have already been fouled, just as no one has more legal power to halt the
rush to drill under the Arctic's melting ice than Inuit, Sami, and other northern
Indigenous tribes whose livelihoods would be jeopardized by an offshore oil spill.
Whether they are able to exercise those rights is another matter.

This power was on display in January 2014 when a coalition of Alaskan Native
tribes, who had joined forces with several large green groups, won a major court
victory against Shell's already scandal-plagued Arctic drilling adventures. Led by
the Native village of Point Hope, the coalition argued that when the U.S. Interior
Department handed out drilling permits to Shell and others in the Chukchi Sea, it
failed to take into account the full risks, including the risks to Indigenous Inupiat
ways of life, which are inextricably entwined with a healthy ocean. As Port Hope
mayor Steve Oomittuk explained when the lawsuit was launched, his people "have
hunted and depended on the animals that migrate through the Chukchi Sea for
thousands of years. This is our garden, our identity, our livelihood. Without it we
would not be who we are today. . . . We oppose any activity that will endanger our
way of life and the animals that we greatly depend on." Faith Gemmill, executive
director of Resisting Environmental Destruction on Indigenous Lands, one of the
groups behind the lawsuit, notes that for the Inupiat who rely on the Chukchi Sea,
"you cannot separate environmental impacts from subsistence impacts, for they
are the same.

THIS CHANGES EVERYTHING | 324

A federal appeals court ruled in the coalition's favor, finding that the Department
of the Interior's risk assessments were based on estimates that were "arbitrary and
capricious," or presented "only the best case scenario for environmental
harm." Rather like the shoddy risk assessments that set the stage for BP's
Deepwater Horizon disaster.

John Sauven, executive director of Greenpeace U.K., described the ruling as "a
massive blow to Shell's Arctic ambitions." Indeed just days later, the company
announced that it was putting its Arctic plans on indefinite hold. "This is a
disappointing outcome, but the lack of a clear path forward means that I am not
prepared to commit further resources for drilling in Alaska in 2014," said Shell
CEO Ben van Beurden. "We will look to relevant agencies and the Court to resolve
their open legal issues as quickly as possible." Without Indigenous groups raising
the human rights stakes in this battle, it's a victory that might never have taken
place.

Worldwide, companies pushing for vast new coal mines and coal export
terminals are increasingly being forced to similarly reckon with the unique legal
powers held by Indigenous peoples. For instance, in Western Australia in 2013 the
prospect of legal battles over native title was an important factor in derailing a
planned $45 billion LNG (liquefied natural gas) processing plant and port, and
though the state government remains determined to force gas infrastructure and
fracking on the area, Indigenous groups are threatening to assert their traditional
ownership and procedural rights in court. The same is true of communities facing

1 8

coal bed methane development in New South Wales.

Meanwhile, several Indigenous groups in the Amazon have been steadfastly
holding back the oil interests determined to sacrifice new swaths of the great
forests, protecting both the carbon beneath the ground and the carbon-capturing
trees and soil above those oil and gas deposits. They have asserted their land rights
with increasing success at the Inter- American Court of Human Rights, which has
sided with Indigenous groups against governments in cases involving natural

resource and territorial rights. And the U'wa, an isolated tribe in Colombia's
Andean cloud forests — where the tree canopy is perpetually shrouded in mist —
have made history by resisting repeated attempts by oil giants to drill in their
territory, insisting that stealing the oil beneath the earth would bring about the
tribe's destruction. (Though some limited drilling has taken place.)

As the Indigenous rights movement gains strength globally, huge advances are
being made in recognizing the legitimacy of these claims. Most significant was the
United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, adopted by the

THIS CHANGES EVERYTHING | 325

General Assembly in September 2007 after 143 member states voted in its favor
(the four opposing votes — United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand —
would each, under domestic pressure, eventually endorse it as well). The
declaration states that, "Indigenous peoples have the right to the conservation and
protection of the environment and the productive capacity of their lands or
territories and resources." And further that they have "the right to redress" for the
lands that "have been confiscated, taken, occupied, used or damaged without their
free, prior and informed consent." Some countries have even taken the step of
recognizing these rights in revised constitutions. Bolivia's constitution, approved
by voters in 2009, states that Indigenous peoples "are guaranteed the right to prior
consent: obligatory consultation by the government, acting in good faith and in
agreement, prior to the exploitation of non-renewable natural resources in the

territory they inhabit." A huge, hard-won legal victory.

Might vs. Rights

And yet despite growing recognition of these rights, there remains a tremendous
gap between what governments say (and sign) and what they do — and there is no
guarantee of winning when these rights are tested in court. Even in countries with
enlightened laws as in Bolivia and Ecuador, the state still pushes ahead with
extractive projects without the consent of the Indigenous people who rely on those

lands. And in Canada, the United States, and Australia, these rights are not only
ignored, but Indigenous people know that if they try to physically stop extractive
projects that are clearly illegal, they will in all likelihood find themselves on the
wrong side of a can of pepper spray — or the barrel of a gun. And while the lawyers
argue the intricacies of land title in court, buzzing chainsaws proceed to topple
trees that are four times as old as our countries, and toxic fracking fluids seep into
the groundwater.

The reason industry can get away with this has little to do with what is legal and
everything to do with raw political power: isolated, often impoverished Indigenous
peoples generally lack the monetary resources and social clout to enforce their
rights, and anyway, the police are controlled by the state. Moreover the costs of
taking on multinational extractive companies in court are enormous. For instance
in the landmark "Rainforest Chernobyl" case in which Ecuador's highest court
ordered Chevron to pay $9.5 billion in damages, a company spokesman famously

THIS CHANGES EVERYTHING | 326

said: "We're going to fight this until hell freezes over — and then we'll fight it out

on the ice." (And indeed, the fight still drags on.)""

I was struck by this profound imbalance when I traveled to the territory of the
Beaver Lake Cree Nation in northern Alberta, a community that is in the midst of
one of the highest- stakes legal battles in the tar sands. In 2008, the band filed a
historic lawsuit charging that by allowing its traditional territories to be turned into
a latticework of oil and gas infrastructure, and by poisoning and driving away the
local wildlife, the provincial and federal governments, as well as the British
Crown, had infringed no fewer than fifteen thousand times on the First Nation's

treaty rights to continue to hunt, fish, and trap on their territory. What set the case
apart was that it was not about one particular infringement, but an entire model of
poisonous, extractive development, essentially arguing that this model itself
constituted a grave treaty violation.

"The Governments of Canada and Alberta have made a lot of promises to our
people and we intend to see those promises kept," said Al Lameman, the
formidable chief of the Beaver Lake Cree Nation at the time the lawsuit was filed
(Lameman had made history before, filing some of the first Indigenous human
rights challenges against the Canadian government). Against the odds, the case has
proceeded through the Canadian court system, and in March 2012 an Alberta court
flatly rejected government efforts to have the case dismissed as "frivolous," an

"abuse of the Court's process," and "unmanageable."

A year after that ruling, I met Al Lameman, now retired, and his cousin
Germaine Anderson, an elected band councilor, as well as the former chief's niece,
Crystal Lameman, who has emerged as one of the most compelling voices against
the tar sands on the international stage. These are three of the people most
responsible for moving the lawsuit forward, and Germaine Anderson had invited
me to a family barbecue to discuss the case.

It was early July and after a long dark winter it was as if a veil had lifted: the sun
was still bright at 10 p.m. and the northern air had a thin, baked quality. Al
Lameman had aged considerably in recent years and slipped in and out of the
conversation. Anderson, almost painfully shy, had also struggled with her health.
The spot where the family met for this gathering was where she spent the summer
months: a small trailer in a clearing in the woods, without running water or
electricity, entirely off the grid. I knew the Beaver Lake Cree were in a David and
Goliath struggle. But on that endless summer evening, I suddenly understood what
this actually meant: some of the most marginalized people in my country — many
of them, like all the senior members of the Lameman clan, survivors of the

THIS CHANGES EVERYTHING | 327

intergenerational trauma of abusive residential schools — are taking on some of the
wealthiest and most powerful forces on the planet. Their heroic battles are not just
their people's best chance of a healthy future; if court challenges like Beaver
Lake's can succeed in halting tar sands expansion, they could very well be the best
chance for the rest of us to continue enjoying a climate that is hospitable to human
life. That is a huge burden to bear and that these communities are bearing it with
shockingly little support from the rest of us is an unspeakable social injustice. A
few hours north, a different Indigenous community, the Athabasca Chipewyan
First Nation (ACFN), recently launched another landmark lawsuit, this one taking
on Shell and the Canadian government over the approval of a huge tar sands mine
expansion. The band is also challenging another Shell project, the proposed Pierre
River Mine, which it says "would significantly impact lands, water, wildlife and
the First Nation's ability to utilize their traditional territory." Once again the
mismatch is staggering. The ACFN, with just over one thousand members and an
operating budget of about $5 million, is battling both the Canadian government
and Shell, with its 92,000 employees across more than seventy countries and 2013
global revenues of $451.2 billion. Many communities see odds like these and,

understandably, never even get in the ring.

It is this gap between rights and resources — between what the law says and what
impoverished people are able to force vastly more powerful entities to do — that
government and industry have banked on for years.

"Honour the Treaties"

What is changing is that many non-Native people are starting to realize that
Indigenous rights — if aggressively backed by court challenges, direct action, and
mass movements demanding that they be respected — may now represent the most
powerful barriers protecting all of us from a future of climate chaos. Which is why,
in many cases, the movements against extreme energy extraction are becoming
more than just battles against specific oil, gas, and coal companies and more, even,
than pro-democracy movements. They are opening up spaces for a historical
reconciliation between Indigenous peoples and non-Natives, who are finally
understanding that, at a time when elected officials have open disdain for basic
democratic principles, Indigenous rights are not a threat, but a tremendous gift.
Because the original Indigenous treaty negotiators in much of North America had
the foresight to include language protecting their right to continue living off their

THIS CHANGES EVERYTHING | 328

traditional lands, they bequeathed to all residents of these and many other countries
the legal tools to demand that our governments refrain from finishing the job of
flaying the planet. And so, in communities where there was once only anger,
jealousy, and thinly veiled racism, there is now something new and unfamiliar.
"We're really thankful for our First Nations partners in this struggle," said Lionel
Conant, a property manager whose home in Fort St. James, British Columbia, is
within sight of the proposed Northern Gateway pipeline. "[They've] got the legal
weight to deal with [the pipeline] ... because this is all unceded land." In
Washington State, anti-coal activists talk about the treaty rights of the Lummi as
their "ace in the hole" should all other methods of blocking the export terminals
fail. In Montana, the Sierra Club's Mike Scott told me bluntly, "I don't think
people understand the political power Natives have as sovereign nations, often
because they lack the resources to exercise that power. They can stop energy

, „26

projects in a way we can t.

In New Brunswick, Suzanne Patles, a Mi'kmaq woman involved in the anti-
fracking movement, described how non-Natives "have reached out to the

Indigenous people to say 'we need help.' " Which is something of a turnaround
from the saviorism and pitying charity that have poisoned relationships between
Indigenous peoples and well-meaning liberals for far too long. It was in the context
of this gradual shift in awareness that Idle No More burst onto the political scene
in Canada at the end of 2012 and then spread quickly south of the border. North
American shopping centers — from the enormous West Edmonton Mall to
Minnesota's Mall of America — were suddenly alive with the sounds of hand
drums and jingle dresses as Indigenous people held flash mob round dances across
the continent at the peak of the Christmas shopping season. In Canada, Native
leaders went on hunger strikes, and youths embarked on months-long spiritual
walks and blockaded roads and railways.

The movement was originally sparked by a series of attacks by the Canadian
government on Indigenous sovereignty, as well as its all-out assault on existing
environmental protections, particularly for water, to pave the way for rapid tar
sands expansion, more mega- mines, and projects like Enbridge's Northern

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